Fit Villains: Selfish, Shameless, Sassy, Fitness.

Please. Take 5 minutes to read, nod & fist pump along with this post. WORTH EVERY SECOND.

Bam. Ashley Judd, you are my hero.

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It’s Body Bash Friday, celebrating bodies everywhere & giving you tips on how to love yours a little better.

In the fitness community, there’s a dangerous trend emphasizing looks as a determinant of health. The words ‘healthy’, ‘slim’, ‘thin’ & ‘happy’ are often linked together, as though they are synonymous with each other. To achieve happiness, according to women’s magazines, all you need to do is remove your flaws, lose the weight and do it all ‘the healthy’ way.

MYTH: Healthy does NOT have a size. You can be overweight (and even obese) and perfectly healthy. The same way you can be thin & slim and UNHEALTHY.

It’s true that obesity may raise your risk of certain diseases: but obesity in and of itself is NOT a disease. While I encourage people to move, eat healthier & make significant changes in their lives, I know that in order to be ‘healthy’, their bodies need to function efficiently: even without weight loss, people who engage in healthy practices can improve their health immensely. Regardless of their size. 

Don’t let anyone tell you that healthy has a certain ‘look’. It doesn’t.

Excerpt from Cosmo Magazine: The Best Seller That Sells Women Short

Appearance is Everything.

In Cosmo‘s regular workout and health sections, readers are once again sent the message that weight loss = fitness = sex appeal. The emphasis on appearance rather than health or abilities is reinforced in every issue by the “You, Even Better” section and regular fitness and health features. For example:

• “The Ultimate Sexy A** Workout” (“to kick your booty into shape in time for skinny jean season!”)
• “45 ways to instantly feel sexy and healthy” (with a young woman in a short, flipped-up dress, exposing her legs and breasts)
• “Diet Dangers,” featuring “The Dumbest Thing You Can Do to Your Boobs,” on how yo-yo dieting “will make your twins less perky” instead of “gorgeous and firm” (with an extremely thin and almost completely nude young woman covering her breasts with her hands and posing in the mirror)
• “Can Getting Fit Get You a Date?”

Each of these (and sooo many more) are examples of how Cosmo combines health-oriented terms with oppressive, objectified terms that forfeit real fitness in favor of a sexualized male gaze. When the most popular magazine for women 18-49 marginalizes actual health and fitness by focusing exclusively on what they claim will increase sex appeal, there’s a problem. Counteract this messed-up fitness perspective in your own life by joining us for a NEW kind of New Year’s resolutions (no matter when in 2012 you start) in our Body Hate Apocalypse!

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This article is so full of WIN, it hurts. Excerpts…

Henry Farid, a Dartmouth Professor who specializes in digital forensics, put it quite succinctly: “The more and more we use this editing, the higher and higher the bar goes. They’re creating things that are physically impossible. We’re seeing really radical digital plastic surgery…big breasts, tiny waist, ridiculously long legs, elongated neck. All the body fat is removed, all the wrinkles are removed, the skin is smoothed out.” But you don’t have to be a professor to see this impossibly high bar being raised higher by the minute.

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We are in the midst of a beautiful reality that is ours once we recognize it and grasp hold of it.And studies show that when we can learn to love ourselves – despite the beauty ideals we are surrounded by and cannot obtain – it shows! Recent studies show us that girls who don’t like their bodies or appreciate them – regardless of their actual appearance – become more sedentary over time and pay less attention to having a healthy diet. And that makes sense. If you think you’re gross and worthless, why would you take care of yourself?

On the flipside of that study, research has found that girls who feel good about themselves and respect their bodies – regardless of what they look like - are more likely to be physically active and eat healthy. They are less likely to gain unnecessary weight and they make healthy lifestyle choices far into the future. How we think about our bodies and our beauty has everything to do with how we treat ourselves. When we can learn to love and respect ourselves, regardless of how our bodies appear, it shows! We must learn this now and we must begin to teach the little girls in our lives how beautiful their realities are and can always be.

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Here’s an outrageous idea: What would happen if confident, happy, beautiful women decided to forego painful and expensive anti-aging procedures, breast lifts and enhancements, liposuction, all over hair removal or tanning regimens? How could that change the way their daughters, students, friends, nieces and coworkers perceived themselves and their own “flawed,” lined, real faces? Their own varied-looking and perfectly functional breasts, behinds, thighs, arms and abs? How could simply owning and (treating kindly and speaking nicely about) our so-called “imperfect” bodies affect not only our own lives, but those over whom we have influence? Is it possible to slowly but deliberately change the perception of these “flaws” as something to shame, hide and fix at any cost to something acceptable and embraceable in all their human, womanly real-ness?

We say yes.

Read more. And more. And MORE.