Recently, there seems to be a new wave of body image aspirations among young women. We’ve transitioned from agreeing with Kate Moss’s iconic phrase of “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”, idolizing the fragile looking figures, to adopting a new mindset. More recently, young women are starting to honor the “strong is the new skinny” mantra.
Gazing longingly at “thinspo” or “thin inspiration”, and desiring to be a size 00 is starting to become a thing of the past. Now, more young women are falling for the “fitspo” trend, or “fit inspiration”, longing for a toned and sculpted body.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be fit. Eating healthy and working out is unarguable great for your mental and physical health—in moderation. Valuing fitness over a skeleton figure is certainly a better idea, but when it’s taken to extremes, you might find that our obsession with healthy, is actually unhealthy.
It’s great, and often suggested, to have a picture to motivate you to push harder, eat better, run faster. However, you should keep in mind that a picture of someone who appears to be in phenomenal shape can often be very misleading. To have the rock hard body of a fitness model, you would most likely have to adopt an unhealthy devotion to exercise and eating, take fat-burning or muscle-building supplements which can have detrimental long-term effects on your body, and you would find that your time management becomes increasingly difficult.
Aspiring to look like a fitness model is unrealistic for several reasons. Most fitness models have a personal trainer, nutritionist, chef, and even a yogi. They work hard for their bodies because their income depends on it. The fine lines of sculpted biceps and six packs abs aren’t solely genetic and require excessive training and nurture.
Exercise and healthy eating is awesome. I won’t deny that. I love discovering healthy food, and exercise is absolutely my anti-drug. But obsession with exercise is far too common for young women who want a fit bod. At first, an obsession with exercise may seem beneficial, but fanaticism is dangerous when it begins to interfere or dominate your life. When your personal relationships are endangered or even sacrificed because your exercise routine always comes first, or you begin to ignore injuries, or feel incurable guilt for missing a workout, that’s when healthy becomes unhealthy. The purpose of exercise is to enrich your life, not to become your life.
As for healthy eating or “clean eating”, the dangers can be even more psychologically taxing. Those who have an unhealthy obsession with otherwise healthy eating may be suffering from “orthorexia nervosa,” a term which literally means “fixation on righteous eating.” Orthorexia starts out as an innocent attempt to eat more healthfully, but orthorexics become fixated on food quality and purity. They become consumed with what and how much to eat.
To look like a fitness model, you would have to drink an absurd amount of water, making you have to pee around every 20 minutes. You would have to go to bed earlier than convenient, and wake up early to get your first workout of the day. You would have to prep all of your meals, and keep track of the nutrition facts. If you wanted to take a day off from exercising, it would have to be predetermined ahead of time. If you wanted to indulge in a piece of chocolate, you would have to account for it in your macros and caloric intake, and most likely find that you couldn’t due to the amount of sugar it contained.
Basically what it all comes down to is that you’re better off loving your body. It’s cliché, it’s simple, and it’s going to be something you hear for the rest of your life. You get one set of genes and one body, and fighting your body is only going to bring you distress. A healthy diet and exercise should reflect how you feel about your body. Love your body enough to take care of it, obsession and disapproval certainly don’t qualify as love.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dana-ullman/health-obsession_b_868798.html
http://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/orthorexia-nervosa