At least that’s what it said on the box she placed in the middle of the living room. Whether my mother saw the absurdity of the situation I could not tell as she gleefully ripped open the box and lifted its contents out onto the floor in front of me. Contrary to your expectation of the small pleasure device originating from Victorian England, this “vibrator” referred to a rather large fitness platform cheaply made and poorly named in China. My mother used the machine for an impressive three weeks. Each day she’d stand on the black plastic soap box like mechanism and vibrate for ten minutes. Each day she’d boast to me how she felt energized once again and how her lower back pain had subsided miraculously thanks to that 2 x 2 foot vibrating platform. Slowly the ten minutes of vibrating became shorter, her back cramps came back as did her lethargy and “The Vibrator” was put in the spare room. Soon after, my mother came home with another box – it was the shake weight. I was eleven and this was my introduction into the world of fitness fads.
Love it or hate it, we live in a culture that’s obsessed with fitness. Much like our fixation on food, fashion, music or any other obsession we North American consumers can’t seem to get enough of, fitness has the potential to get weird…very weird, very fast. In a reluctant trip back to seventies and eighties where jazzercise and Richard Simmons’ short shorts reigned supreme, it seems we have found the origin story of fitness. While it’s easy to point fingers and cringe at these spandex-clad figures, as the reason why we still run back and forth to techno remixes of today’s top forty, this is only the tip of the iceberg.
Fitness and wellbeing, in general, has a long history that takes us on another trip back to our primal ancestors. Back then our primary objective was to survive and to survive meant to be able to walk, run, jump, swing, balance and move our bodies efficiently enough to be able to both avoid predators and prey on our next meal. Now I’m no expert on caveman psychology but I think it’s safe to say that caveman Joe never once stopped to think about the number of calories he burned while chasing that cattle, nor did he ponder on the ratio of carbohydrates to protein while he ate it. We simply were, without thought, healthy. What happened since then?
In short, we evolved. Much more than survived, we learned to live; brawn of ancient military training gave way to strategic warfare dominated by machines. Survival of the fittest was challenged by the power of a strong mentality. Is this a bad thing? Has evolution taken away our priority of physical wellbeing? Absolutely not. Evolution is necessary for survival and modern research has added a good fifty five years to our life span compared to our Paleolithic ancestors. The point is that fitness is not an invention of modern society that is weird as it is unnecessary. But as with many fads like food and fashion, it can become a trap that capitalizes off something that we already have free access to.
The strange thing about the whole fitness frenzy is that we recognize it as a hobby or specialized lifestyle more so than just a part of everyday life and this may be the root of North America’s health problems. Today we are bombarded with health facts from the covers of magazines to the nutritional facts with serving suggestions even Gwyneth Paltrow could not be satisfied with. Are they trying to guilt us into a healthy lifestyle? Why is it that we are among the most informed and technologically abled countries in the world when it comes to health and nutrition, yet we still list thirtieth behind both equally developed and lesser developed countries? Why is there a book on my mother’s bookcase called “French Women don’t get fat”? Maybe it’s because unlike places like Canada, America, and the UK who have ironically fallen prey to both the fitness culture and increasing obesity rates, other countries don’t see fitness as a novelty. One could argue that if you were a starving Nigerian child who had to walk ten miles to get water trudging uphill both ways, you’d be stick thin too. But if you equate looking like a World Vision child to being healthy, I strongly advise you to educate yourself before you continuing reading. Health, by its definition, is being free from illness and disease and in sound condition of body and mind. To entertain the topic of my mother’s book, I look to the French and observe their attitudes to fitness. Surprisingly, with diet that has long been taunted as a model for health, the French have lower cases of cancer and cardiovascular disease. Do they have the equivalence of gyms as they do grams of butter to cancel out all that saturated fat? Nope. In fact, in the early 2000’s Planet Fitness expanded to include studios in Paris, which all but failed to catch on to the Parisians. Today finding a gym in Paris has the same likelihood of finding vegan restaurant in Texas (they have a sign saying no vegetarians welcome if that’s any indication). So what is the secret? According to science and an episode of 60 minutes – drinking wine and walking has led to this phenomenon known as the “French Paradox”. What was North America’s response? Wine can now be labelled as a “health food” and the invention of a shoe that promises to “tone” as one walks. Even by the lifestyle of other countries, fitness has found a way to market seemingly common knowledge as a novelty trend in health. It is for this reason that books like “French Women don’t get Fat” exist.
Writing this in 2015, a year that celebrates the booty and body positivity, one may think that this embracement of what we have rather than what any exercise plan can offer us may lead to the demise of fitness fads, but a closer look and this seemingly empowering movement is in fact a fitness trend of its own. Take a song like “All about that Bass” that seems to finally view curves in a positive light and you get fads like Barre and “booty” camps that, while moving away from solely calorie blasting cardio, still enforce a certain body image of its own. In the rise of feminism and women empowerment, just about everything has become empowering including apparently pole fitness which is exactly what it sounds like. If you thought nothing could be worse than a young Jane Fonda’s unitard, at least it never posed injury risks like portable dance poles. Nothing reads safe more than a pole that promises “one minute or less installation”. To the opposite sex, fitness has seemed to take a turn back to its Paleolithic roots with Crossfit that tries to mimic the sporadic movement of our ancestors. This is often with the accompaniment of the cave man diet which, again, exactly what it sounds like – mimics a diet that supposedly existed thousands of years ago used when man had an average lifespan of 25 years. It goes without saying that the “evolution of fitness” is anything but.
Now the purpose of this wasn’t to make you shamefully hide your exercise ball in the closet nor was it a trying to prove that exercise it not an important part of living a long and healthy life. But when it comes to “fitness” do not be so easily swayed by the shiny machines and expensive Zumba wear. Exercise is a need. Fitness is a social construct. Whether you choose to buy groupons for aerial yoga like my mother or take the stairs every day. One does not reign superior to another. Just run, walk, crawl, roll, whatever. You’ll be doing something a third of our country does not. Move.