Some Thoughts on Body Positivity and Representation in Fitness Media

Recently I read this Buzzfeed article as part of their Body Positivity Week series. I'm really excited about this series because so much of the conversation around fitness and health centers around being thin. As we all know, being thin doesn't necessarily make you healthy. There might be a correlation between the two, but they're not mutually exclusive terms.

Body positivity is important to me because I know that shaming people into losing weight doesn't work. All you end up doing is creating a cycle of shame where people feel awful about themselves, which doesn't create positive change. If we allow people to feel comfortable in their own bodies, they are more likely to decide that they want to start working out. When I started working out, it had nothing to do with wanting to get fit. It was part of my treatment plan for managing my GAD. Similarly, until I felt well enough to start taking care of myself I didn't feel good enough about myself to start exercising.

I would really love for the conversation about health and exercise to center around doing things that make you feel good. That your meals don't need to be earned and that you don't need to deprive yourself of things that you enjoy to be healthy.

Through more casual web browsing, I came across this website. I'm going to reference it specifically, but it follows the same trend as many fitness communities: paying lip service to body positivity while only representing a single body type.

At first glance, there's nothing really wrong with Fit Bottomed Girls. It gets its title from a Queen song. They use cutesy graphics. They post daily articles about things related to fitness, motivation and inspiration, nutrition and mindfulness. There's even a nice little graphic at the bottom of the page proclaiming that "Fit bottoms come in all shapes and sizes."

Do you notice anything in this photo?

If fit bottomed girls come in all shapes and sizes, why are you only showing girls in the same size: petite and slim? Perhaps those three women are meant to be the site's three owners, but why use the slogan if that's the case?

Upon further perusal of the website, I found an article where one of the site owners talks about how they have finally found stock images that look like them. Okay, great. Maybe they'll start using those stock images instead. Did they? Not that I can see.

In another post about minding your own business about other people's fitness goals (published after the article about the better representation in fitness stock photos, mind) - a concept with which I agree wholeheartedly - they're again using a stock photo wherein all the women pictured are slim and petite.

 

See the little pram in the top right corner? This was originally posted on their sister site for pregnant women, new mothers and young families. None of these women look pregnant, and none of them look like a recent mother. Granted, it's a stock photo and while the post about "minding your own fitness" is new, the photo itself may not be. I don't know, and I don't particularly care to find out.

 

I just think that if you're going to tout yourself as an inclusive website, you should make more of an effort to actually follow through on that ideal.

 

The last thing that I take issue with about Fit Bottomed Girls is their tagline: "Keeping a lid on the junk in the trunk." *rolls eyes forever*

 

Firstly, the size of your butt has very little to do with your overall fitness level. You can be fit and have a big butt - in fact that often happens as your overall fat percentage drops and the gluteus muscles become more prominent. You can be direly unhealthy and have a pancake butt. You can be crazy fit and have no butt to speak of at all.

 

Can we please just accept that people are going to be whatever size and shape they are? Can we stop portraying a single image of fitness like it's the only real one? And for the love of all things purple, can we stop coming up with stock photos of women vapidly smiling into their undressed salads? Because an undressed salad is just sad. You have nothing to smile about, girl.

 



Screenshot photos taken from fitbottomedgirls.com. Woman with crazy eyes and undressed salad taken from http://staging.thekitchn.com/10-totally-heinous-crimes-against-salad-that-need-to-be-stopped-220244.

My Journey with Mental Illness: Getting a Diagnosis

Today is #BellLetsTalk Day, which is a day designed to spread awareness and raise money towards mental health related causes. As such, I thought today was a good day to talk about my own experiences with mental illness.

I was always an anxious child. For as long as I can remember, I have feared that something catastrophic would happen in my day to day life. This was addressed in passing when I was in elementary school - one of my teachers noticed that I had written something like "I hate myself" on one of my assignments and the school board got involved. I scarcely remember this, but I remember both sitting with a social worker once a month and getting pulled out of school to go to a psychology clinic in the city. I remember going to two or three child psychologists before finding the right fit (our insurance at the time was pretty crummy, so choice was a little limited. Luckily the last one was fantastic). I was able to develop some coping skills, go through a little grief counseling and generally just return to being a happier and easier to deal with child.

Most of my primary and secondary education went well in that regard. I was, however, hyper-aware and extremely worried about how I was perceived. I would go through endless cycles of "What if they don't like me? What if they make fun of me? What if they don't want to be friends with me anymore?" It was exhausting (and still is, to a certain extent).

Things got bad in the year that I was in Grade 12. This was the year that I was applying to university. It was also the year of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, which my dad was fortunate enough to have been chosen by Bell to work at. He spent most of that high school year in Whistler, which was great for him (but less so for my mom and I). I had always done well in school (anxiety tends to lend itself well to being productive - "What if I don't do well at this? What if people think I'm stupid?" is a pretty good motivator to doing schoolwork), but this was the first time that I had ever struggled. This was the first year that I had an ineffective teacher, who actually told me that I wasn't smart enough to be an engineer, and it was also the first year that I had had so many heavy subjects at once. Suffice to say, the pressure was intense. I don't think that my mother and I have ever fought as much as we did that year.

I remember the physical symptoms: pounding heart, whirling brain, trouble sleeping, hands shaking. It was horrible. Still, I didn't go see anyone or talk to anyone because "it was just stress." In any case, my symptoms became much more manageable when I was accepted to nearly every university that I had applied to (I probably would have been accepted to the last one, but I had already accepted the offer from my first choice school).

Fast forward two years to my second year of engineering. I was in a dual degree program - chemistry and chemical engineering. I had just broken up with my live-in boyfriend and was unable to move out. My physical health was poor because of the house I was living in (my landlord at the time was a slum lord and there was so much mould that you could smell it as soon as you walked in). All of the symptoms that I had experienced in Grade 12 were back, but 10x worse. It was so bad that I hardly had the energy to do anything beyond get out of bed in the morning and get ready for school.

When classes finally ended and I moved back home for the summer, my symptoms didn't get any better. All I could think about was how my friends had abandoned me and how my ex had cheated on me (this has actually not been confirmed, but I very firmly believed it at the time). I lay in bed all day, staring at the ceiling. Eventually, my mother took me to the family doctor because she couldn't watch me do it any longer.

After describing my symptoms to her (the endless cycles of "What if I never get a job? What if they don't let me switch disciplines? What if I have to live at home forever?", the baseless feelings of doom, the perpetually racing heart, the body aches, etc.), she diagnosed me with Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Panic Disorder.

Honestly, that day was the best day of my life. I finally knew what was wrong with me. I wasn't crazy and I wasn't broken. When I was having a panic episode (which is like a panic attack, but lasts for a longer period), I was dissociating and not having some kind of mental breakdown. In those states, my body was just doing what it could to survive what it thought was a life or death situation.

The doctor originally prescribed me an SSRI, which I took for about a week, then stopped because it gave me wicked migraines. In the end, I decided that I would rather under go Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) which was more about re-training your brain than medicating it.

I have been doing much better (apart from last year's six-month long panic and depressive episode). I have a brilliant therapist, both here at MUN and back home. I encourage any Queen's friends to go to the counseling centre in LaSalle because they are fantastic. My journey is ongoing, and it always will be, but I no longer feel as if the obstacles that I may face are insurmountable.

Please, if you're struggling, reach out to someone. It doesn't need to be me or a therapist, but get help. You don't have to do this on your own. I'm here for you. We're here for you. You are so not alone in this.

Be well.

-K