Skinny is soooo last year, healthy is now
Skinny was bad back then too. From Modern Mechanix.
Last week on my blog I kind of railed against 'healthy' for a bit, and my sister asked me about it afterwards. "I just had the feeling there was something else going on there," she said. "I mean, is healthy all that bad?" She's very astute, and right in that I'm actually not anti-health or anything. But I think my reaction had more to do with something I've seen lots of places and on many fronts. Namely that 'healthy' is the new socially appropriate code word for 'skinny'.
I think there was a certain amount of backlash against the "thin by any means necessary" stuff, what with the anorexic models dying and celebrities with ribs you can count easily and the fact that the majority of people do not, and will never, ever, look like those celebrities. So out of that storm came a new movement, one that was anti-diet and pro-health. And believe you me, many in the media heard the cry.
So skinny became healthy. It's not enough to feel the pressure to be svelte, you also aren't supposed to have that as your big goal, at least not for body-image reasons. Oh, you can want to lose weight because it's good for you (though some studies have shown thin doesn't reap the health benefits once promised, nor does overweight necessarily confer the sentence of chronic illness and death some folks touted) but not because you want to be thin because that means you might be a little obsessed. Or shallow. Or anxious. Or, like, listening to what so many people have told you your whole freaking life.
So yes, the goal of losing weight is okay, but the reasons have to be health and the means have to be good for you. I'm all for doing stuff in a healthy way, lord knows I'm the last person to believe in crazy skinnifying stuff. But how come the same people who brought you skinny are now dressing their crud up in healthy? And do people really go for weight loss goals because they really, really care only about health?
So I get people who tell me "I want to exercise to get healthy" and only sheepishly confess later that they'd like to lose a few, or ten, or twenty pounds. Well, welcome to a vast club of many. I just don't know if what people want has changed all that much, it's just that how we are supposed to talk about it has.
Now the celebrity magazines don't just tell you who's gained too much weight, they also tell you who is too thin, with exactly the same air of righteousness. Oooh, celebrity X has gone way to far. Never mind that we don't know really what any of these people have done to gain or lose weight, if the 'healthy' ones are actually healthy, or if they take diet pills mixed with protein shakes to achieve that healthy figure, or if the too-skinny ones are ill or dealing with trauma. In fact, the ones that have gained "too much" might just be 'healthy' too (though usually pregnancy is the first speculation.)
The diet plans have caught on to this as well. Nowadays, "diets" are bad. Studies say so. No, it's about lasting lifestyle changes---health, if you will. Jenny Craig now has a "size-fill-in-the-blank" campaign that's supposed to promote the notion that there is no ideal size. I love me some Queen Latifah, but are we supposed to think this isn't a diet, but rather a health plan? Lots of packaged and processed food, portion control, limited calories...smells like a diet to me, and one that makes you a size smaller, probably as a bigger priority than healthier. I mean, yes, it's better than promising we'll all be size twos, but let's be honest, shall we? But if you think they are alone, talk to Weight Watchers, who now call themselves a "lifestyle program". Here's a nice rundown on how this logic works if your lifestyle is one of being a dieter. The programs haven't changed much, but the way they get framed sure has.
This is not unusual: I recently got an e-mail from the editor of a major fitness magazine. She (or her correspondent) first compliments me on my review of disposable panties. Since I'm not even incontinent enough qualified to do such a review, nor have I done one, I'm guessing that means someone made some assumptions about my last post without reading it much, but instead just looked at the pretty picture. The e-mail subject is "check out FITNESS magazine" and the first line is "Wea re changing the conversation from skinny to healthy!!!!!!!!" Direct cut and paste there. Anyhow, if I give their fitness mag the same cursory pictures-only look, I see that the scrolling stories are, "Lose the desk job jiggle" and "Melt inches off your waist", plus one on healthy shopping lists. If I click on "weight loss", which is still a separate category from "health" it says "Drop a jeans size in 30 days". Wow, is that a different conversation than the one we've been having? Maybe it's all in the titles, ahem. Oh, I guess they never actually said 'skinny' directly, so...
Look, I'm not totally bummed by the change, and there's still plenty of icky people out there selling skinny and diet plain and simple, with plans that rarely yield lasting skinny for the majority, and by means that would hardly qualify as healthy.
But I'm here to tell you that I got into exercise for one simple reason: To lose weight. Because of how I wanted to LOOK. Waa waa, does that make me a bad person? Once I was really in, I ended up liking many more things about it. Like the stress relief and the physical confidence and the energy and having something I cared about and blah blah blah. But probably not enough to do something I absolutely hated with no results. And part of why I still exercise is...
