Why exercise is so hard.
When I was in primary school, I fucking hated sports day. Absolutely. Fucking. Hated it. Every year I vowed to never participate again, (as if I had a choice in the matter) to save myself from the humiliation of hopelessly lobbing my body down the race course, in front of what seemed like North London’s entire population. At first, this was because I had some deep seated belief that I was shit at sport, but even when I won the Year 3 skipping race (humble brag), I would still await the day with the same dread. Why?
Because I thought I was “too fat” to be good at sport.
In my lifetime, ‘fit’ has always looked a certain way. Exercise has been exploited by diet culture, which has turned it into yet another means to control and change our bodies. It’s how to get visible abs, a rock hard bum or toned thighs. Workouts are literally categorised in relation to how they will supposedly make our bodies look: “Sexy Legs in 2 weeks”, “Washboard abs in 6 days”, plastered with close-ups of women in sports bras with worryingly low body fat percentages. The whole vibe of the fitness world is “WORK OUT LIKE ME TO LOOK LIKE ME” which is not only a bare faced lie (our bodies do not work that way), but also bloody draining.
It’s pretty unsurprising that I thought that I hated exercise when the vocabulary around it is akin to the criminal justice system. It’s all about punishment, pain, and reward. You serve time on the treadmill as penance for a kebab the night before, and earn the right to your Christmas dinner by forcing yourself to attend “Barry’s bootcamps” months prior. Whether exercise is enjoyable or not is irrelevant, and often times, we are told it shouldn’t be. “Proper exercise” is practically framed as an act of warfare against our bodies. We are told to “Blast”, “Blitz” and “Burn” them as if they are something to destroy. A “brutal” workout is always a good one, no pain no gain, right?
This is why I’m grated by the fact that “EXERCISE FOR MENTAL HEALTH” is being screamed to the rooftops, when in reality, what a lot of people need to do for their mental (and physical) health, is just slow the fuck down. I’m sure, for some people, exercise is a genuine saving grace for their mental state, and you know what, good for them, I wish them all the best for the future, but I can’t help but feel cynical when so many influencers brand themselves as ‘woke’ by telling us to "listen to our bodies”, and only do what “feels good”, whilst continuing to slap on the number of calories we’ll burn, and what we’ll (definitely not) look like after signing up to their workout programme. “Exercise is my therapy”. Well, no. It’s just not, is it. Exercise most certainly is not your fucking therapy, given that therapy is delving into your psychology with a trained therapist, and exploring past traumas, inner beliefs and how to heal your relationship with yourself. Yes, exercise can be used to clear your headspace, and is a tool to separate yourself from your mind, but the suggestion that physical activity is an antidote to mental illness, is just fucking dangerous. When we are mentally vulnerable, we often feel out of control and purposeless, making it all too easy to obsessively latch onto the control and clarity of a structured workout routine. This creates fertile ground for compulsive behaviours around exercise, and thus a toxic relationship with it, beginning a slippery slope into using exercise to numb and disassociate from uncomfortable feelings: quite literally the opposite of what any good therapist would teach us to do.
We also have to remember the context in which this message is being spouted. We live in a diet culture that upholds weight-loss and leanness as superior, where fat is relentlessly demonised, and where workout routines and diet plans rake in hundreds of billions every year. It is thus, sadly, a fact that the purpose of exercise is often twisted into a direct route to weight-loss, or physique “optimisation”. Whether or not we consciously make this link, our brains are wired to connect the physical activity and physical appearance, adding another toxic layer to the unreserved push for us all to exercise more.
Now, of course to some extent, exercise releases endorphins and has the potential to leave you feeling energised, I’m not out-right denying this. However, the approach to working out that’s modelled to us as the general public, is one where we are expected to be in pain and on the verge of collapse at the end of it. The wide narrative suggests that no matter how much we don’t feel like going for that run/gym session/zumba class, we WILL feel better for it afterwards. Whilst of course, in some cases, this may be true, you may feel better for having moved your body when you didn’t completely feel like it, we need to question whether that good feeling after exercise is a genuinely pleasant and energising physical sensation, or whether it’s simply the knowledge that we’ve burned some calories as a result?
No one ever talks about the importance of rest. The “no excuses” culture demonises any form of relaxation and tells us that “tHe oNLy wOrkoUt yOu rEgRet iS tHe oNe yOu diDn’T dO”. When in reality, there are a plethora of reasons to not exercise. Maybe the only time your friend can meet is during the time you’d usually attend a class, maybe you didn’t get much sleep the night before, maybe you have a work deadline, or maybe, shock horror, you just don’t feel like it. So, not only are there many “excuses” to not exercise, you don’t need a fucking excuse in the first place. Our bodies are not so formulaic that they change depending on whether we’ve exercised or not that day, or how much we’ve eaten in relation to the exercise we may or may not have done. This is just another lie that diet culture has engrained in us to maintain our subscriptions to their bullshit schemes.
Though it might seem like it, I’m really not here to tell you to bash the concept of exercising full stop. Moving our bodies in a way that is actually enjoyable is great, and is good for us. But the irony is, that diet cultures interpretation of exercise (a means to change our bodies), makes it so much less appealing. When we are as conditioned as we are to strive for the ‘ideal’ aesthetic, exercise has turned into a “have to” rather than a “want to”. This link between physical activity and visual results actually undermines long term motivation. When potential aesthetic changes are your driving force to exercise, and they don’t occur, (which they often don’t) and you don’t get those six week abs you were promised, you are taught to feel like something is wrong with you, and that you’re just not cut out for the #gymbunny lifestyle. This stops people from exercising altogether, because it becomes a source of shame, rather than a source of pleasure.
Exercise doesn’t have to be going for a run, or dragging yourself through a Joe Wicks Youtube video (what an intolerable man). It can be walking your dog, dancing in your room, jumping on a trampoline, hula-hooping, you name it. That being said, there is NO obligation for you to exercise. I promise. People on instagram offering home-workouts may make you feel like you’re letting yourself down by lying in bed all day, but if that’s what sounds like the nicest way to spend your day sometimes, here is your permission slip to fucking do it.
