Shaming in the Fitness Culture

A fitness culture is spreading around the world that has great potential to promote better health and well-being. But even a small element of shaming can undermine all of that.

Look at fashion, look at daily routines everywhere, and the fitness culture is impossible to miss. While much of life has become a sedentary ritual of enslavement to glowing rectangles, we feel a constant push in the opposite direction. Hit the gym. Go for a run. Walk while you talk with your colleagues.

Very good reasons are motivating this push for more physical activity. But a new publication in the Journal of Health Psychology also points to the potential harm of weight bias in the fitness culture of frequent exercisers. In a qualitative study of frequent exercisers in the UK, Stuart Flint and Sophie Reale readily found attitudes toward people with obesity that were “overt, demeaning, and condescending.”

Of all the themes that Flint and Reale found in their research, the most disturbing theme is an embrace of bullying. Frequent exercisers told the researchers that “calling someone fat isn’t bullying them” and that “bullying fatties might stop them eating so much.”

Flint and Reale conclude that:

These findings should be considered in efforts to intervene at all levels, to prevent public health campaigns and programmes leading to adverse effects in fostering stigmatising attitudes and beliefs about obesity.

These attitudes are a small part of the fitness movement with potential to destroy the whole of it.

Click here for the study and here for more on the evolution of fitness culture from Daniel Kunitz, author of a new book on the subject, Lift.

The Gym, photograph © Astrid Westvang / flickr

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July 17, 2016