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We are still trying to recover from chasing an unrealistic ideal of health.
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Yes, you read that right. Our pursuit for fitness excellence almost destroyed my wife’s and my health. More than a year after we stopped our health from imploding, it’s unfathomable that we are still trying to recover from the repercussions of chasing this elusive ideal. The irony is sickening.
“I built my body from zero to hero. I am an architect and an artist.” – Delusional Gym-Rat
A growing mountain of scientific literature highlights the mentality to achieve a desirable muscled physique—but this physical manifestation of fitness is dangerous and inherently destructive. Nevertheless, many still buy into the cultish fitness-inspired lifestyles to be socially accepted and try their darndest to emulate the methodologies the social media “fitness celebrities” employ to attain physical perfection.
A growing mountain of scientific literature highlights the mentality to achieve a desirable muscled physique—but this physical manifestation of fitness is dangerous and inherently destructive.
Then, the use of hashtags in social media to denote this fitness trend, from #fitspo (short for fitspiration) and #fitness to #soblessed, started to serve as whiplashes to herd devotees and the insecure into a pen of self-righteousness, self-loathing, and self-judging so that they could be motivated to eat really well and exercise really hard.
As the numbers of health/fitness followers burgeoned exponentially, so did the realisation from health-and-fitness companies that #fitspo-related insecurities are an extremely lucrative haven that they could profit from. Thus began the onslaught of commercially-funded blog posts, listicles, Instagram shots, and Twitter posts that paint the #fitspo trend as a deeply desirable, fashionable and healthy movement.
It also became a movement that thrives immensely from voyeuristic insights into everyone’s daily dietary habits and workout plans, all artistically composed and photographed with #nofilter on Instagram and shared to Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter. It also became a movement that spreads scaremongering, and blurs the lines between fear, fetishism and addiction. The Guardian’s columnist, Roisin Kiberd, succinctly described the movement when she wrote “[it] can be brutally reductive: pain becomes progress, fat deserves shame, weakness is failure and your self-worth is measured by how your body looks.”
How #Fitspo Affected Our Relationship
When my wife and I first started on this fitness-centered lifestyle, inspired by Instagram’s plethora of extremely fit and buff influencers, we were quickly sucked along by the rapids of atheleisure fashion and fitness hashtags. Further influenced and pressured by her ex-colleagues in an industry that constantly espouses the importance of superficiality and material consumption, our lifestyles started to revolve around the spirit-numbing-passion-dousing cycles of workouts, dietary supervision and extreme self-body-shaming.
Everyday for months, we lived a ritual. The morning started with a routine to scrutinise our bodies in the mirror for changes, and compare every bump, every curve and every dimple to Pinterest’s galleries of impossibly (and very possibly Photoshopped) ripped and sculpted bodies. For breakfast, we browsed through Instagram’s daily gaggle of #fitspo influencers for the motivation to eat clean and stay focused on workouts, 13-hours work days and sleep deprivation be damned. The rest of the day would consist of continual snacking on newly-posted #fitspo Pinterest and Instagram posts.
When my wife and I first started on this fitness-centered lifestyle, inspired by Instagram’s plethora of extremely fit and buff influencers, we were quickly sucked along by the rapids of atheleisure fashion and fitness hashtags.
We dove into this fitness-centric lifestyle with vigour and enthusiasm. It was marriage-nirvana for both of us at first. We were riding the high of possessing a common goal, and the process of accomplishing it did seem to deepen our conviction to each other. With every Instagrammed gym session and every #fitspo-inspired meal, the positive feedback we felt we “earned” from our friends and followers entrenched us further in the belief that we should be invested in this lifestyle for the long haul. Therefore, we bought sporting apparel, fitness equipment and too much dietary supplements.
Beyond that, to ensure that we don’t screw it up, we invested thousands of hours in our research on the “right” methods to achieve body perfection, from Tim Ferriss’s kettlebell trainingband Mark Rippetoe’s 5×5 lifting program to Anthony Collova’s IIFYM dietary plan and New Atkin’s low carbohydrates and high protein dietary approach.
As we stumbled deeper down the rabbit’s hole, our rationality slipped along with us too. A laundry list of issues emerged:
We started to count individual calories. Fights over whether a piece of chicken breast has more protein and fats than a piece of turkey breast became commonplace.
We compared every single food label for all groceries that we bought. Every trip to the hypermarket degenerated into a stressful reconnaissance mission to secure the healthiest (according to ever-shifting #fitspo criterion) possible food items.
Every meal became a game of decision-making with incredibly high stakes. The wrong meal (“Eck! They served white rice! The meat had a morsel of fat! The sauce had corn starch!”) would spoil the entire day, and in our minds, irreparably damage our carefully-constructed regimes and our bodies.
My wife started to suffer from an eating disorder—mild anorexia.
The development of my wife’s eating disorder woke me from the stupor #fitspo lulled us into. When the early symptoms of her eating disorder manifested, I thought that it was just her being fussy and insecure about her body (though at that time, she had clearly defined abdominal muscles and was arguably the fittest ever in her life). However, when she started to muse candidly about gagging and throwing up food, and displaying open admiration for bulimic sufferers for their ability to induce vomiting, I became afraid.
When she started to stop eating even #fitspo-approved food “because it was too much and it would wreck my body,” only to embark on ginormous junk food binges moments later “because I just can’t control it—my body automatically grabbed everything and I didn’t even know I was binging,” my fear instantaneously became full-blown panic.
With my in-laws’ and parents’ help, and an incredible amount of patience and conscious effort, we started to systematically dismantle our #fitspo lifestyle.
We cancelled our commercial gym memberships so that we would not be mired in the cesspool of eating disorders.
We weaned us off the habit of compulsively checking every food label.
We discussed solutions at length, and penned our reflections in our weekly letters to each other.
We switched our meal recipes from #fitspo-approved to Mum-approved and medically-approved ones.
We started dining more often with our family members (the support network helped a metric tonne).
We planned our vacations/staycations around recreation and the diversity of local food, and not the hotel gyms. In doing so, we managed to ditch any pressure to stick to #fitspo meals.
Right now, we are acclimatising to a lifestyle in a new house where we could incorporate our hectic work-life with adequate amounts of exercise and moderate amounts of foods that we both love.
Thankfully, she also changed her job around the time when we were trying to get back on track to repair our bodies. The punishing work hours (usually 7am – 11pm) were a blessing in horrible disguise, and helped to distract her a lot.
Right now, we are acclimatising to a lifestyle in a new house where we could incorporate our hectic work-life with adequate amounts of exercise and moderate amounts of foods that we both love. To strike that balance is incredulously tricky, and we are still trying to manage it. However, we much prefer managing this than the hellish experience that was #fitspo.
How about you? Have you gone through such an experience before, or are you going through it now? Share your experience in the comments—it helps a lot to have a kindred spirit!
Note: The only reason why I was not as affected by our immersion in #fitspo was because I suffered what my wife did, many years earlier. I represented my university in taekwondo competitions, and fitness and body image was therefore a huge part of my life then. I idolised Brad Pitt’s body in Fight Club, and constantly aspired to achieve his body shape. Thankfully, I managed to recover after multiple injuries forced me to the bench for months, far away from peer pressure (Facebook was just a startup then—social media was in its embryonic stages).
For help with eating disorders, contact the National Eating Disorders Association or EatingDisorderHope.com.
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This post originally appeared on DanKoh.net.
Photo: Getty
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The post When Fitness Almost Destroyed Our Health appeared first on The Good Men Project.