here is one particular video in the Underbelly, the app by body-positivity advocate and yoga instructor Jessamyn Stanley, that I do almost...
Every time I hear this, I flash back to the many million yoga, barre, and Pilates classes I’ve taken all over New York City where I never once heard anyone suggest that I allow myself to be big or vast. In mainstream group fitness classes, weight loss is a holy war and your belly is the infidel. It is to be confined, controlled, and dominated, not coddled or indulged with warm-and-fuzzy concepts like personal space. The core must be engaged, from pubic bone to sternum, the lower abs scooped in until the belly button presses against the spine. “Imagine that you’re putting on your tightest skinny jeans straight out of the dryer,” one Pilates teacher used to say. Everyone in the class was instructed to keep their abdominal muscles clenched while placing our hands on either side of our rib cages to do what she called “rib cage breathing.” We couldn’t breathe into our bellies, because that would expand them.
Even in yoga, where abdominal breathing is traditionally encouraged, teachers expect stomachs to disappear. “Imagine you’re flattening yourself between two panes of glass,” one teacher I frequented liked to say during Triangle pose. Another begrudgingly allowed me to do a wide-legged Child’s pose instead of a traditional Child’s pose, where the knees stay under the torso, but made sure to note, “You can work toward the real thing.” A third claimed that eating refined sugar outside of class would throw off our balance postures.
My relationship with these classes was complicated. I would go daily for a week or two at a time, putting my mat against a wall in the back, inhaling the smell of everyone’s sweat, and wondering why I was the only person yanking her yoga pants back up after every vinyasa. Then I’d miss one workout, and then another, and then not show up for a month. When I came back, I’d feel compelled to apologize — work had gotten crazy, the holidays were so busy, I was eating so much bread. The teachers were all gracious. When they rolled up from a forward fold, they never needed to pull their yoga pants back up over their bellies. Their cores were constantly engaged. They never ate bread.
Jessamyn Stanley pulls her pants up all the time in her yoga videos. She also burps, farts, and swears. Her Instagram — followed by nearly 400,000 people — is filled with videos of her doing yoga in her underwear and smoking weed. She has become famous, in other words, for being everything that fitness is not supposed to be: Black, queer, messy, and unapologetically fat. And she’s one of the most recognizable faces in a nascent movement of “body positive” yoga teachers, personal trainers, and other fitness professionals determined to offer their services — largely through online video workouts, though some in-person sessions, too — to people who have traditionally felt unwelcome and unsafe in mainstream fitness spaces. Others include Bethany Meyers, the nonbinary LGBTQ activist and creator of the Become Project; Anna Guest-Jelley, founder of Curvy Yoga; and Ilya Parker, a black, nonbinary, transmasculine person in Durham, North Carolina, who offers online fitness coaching, including one geared toward “transmasculine training,” and posts on Instagram as @decolonizingfitness.
There’s an inherent paradox in wanting to still push yourself, still focus on improvement and change, while trying to accept your flaws as they are now.
Not everybody who identifies as a body-positive fitness professional lives in a bigger or otherwise marginalized body. But — in theory, anyway — they all align behind the idea that fitness can and should be about more than weight loss. “You see it with yoga, with aerobics, with CrossFit — all modern fitness culture all uses the same marketing,” Stanley says. “It’s this message of, ‘You’re not good right now. You’re bad right now, and the only way to get good is to sell your soul to this lifestyle and do what we say, and then you can be a good person.’” She rejects that narrative: “I start from, ‘You’re okay today. Everything about you is sufficient.’ Because then there is so much more opportunity to be had.”
It sounds lovely. And I’ve been doing Stanley’s videos almost daily for the past eight months — probably the longest uninterrupted workout stretch of my life — so I can confirm that her practice feels lovely too. It also feels necessary, both for workout consumers who are tired of being told our bodies are problems to fix and the many fitness professionals who are tired of selling that message to us — and to themselves. But there’s also something hard to articulate in the “opportunity” that Stanley describes, and even in trying to define what “body positive” exercise should be. It’s freeing to no longer tie my definition of workout success to my jeans size — but where do we go from there?
There’s an inherent paradox in wanting to still push yourself, still focus on improvement and change, while trying to accept your flaws as they are now. How well you’re “taking up space” turns out to be a goal that’s oddly more difficult to measure and market than pounds or inches lost, especially for an industry that has long thrived by promising visible and quantifiable results. And it’s shockingly easy for the weight-loss message to creep in even when nobody explicitly uses those words, as Peloton’s controversial Christmas commercial underscored last month. Stanley and her cohort seem to be thriving in their niche. But is the fitness industry ready to create safe spaces across the board? It’s not clear that everybody even understands the question.
YYou don’t have to look very hard to find weight stigma in the fitness world. While most diet companies have learned to dress themselves up as lifestyle plans and wellness programs, the fitness industry continues to center itself solidly around weight loss. Group exercise class leaders talk about “earning your cheat day”; spin instructors compare the pace of students in different-sized bodies to motivate the thinner one to try harder; condescending comments are made by fellow gym-goers meant to “encourage” someone daring to work out in a larger body. “I think fatphobia comes out in gyms with this ‘aw, good for you!’ mindset towards fat people,” one commenter on Instagram wrote when I asked for examples. “It’s super annoying when all we want to do is move our bodies.”
All this anecdotal evidence is borne out by research: In an evidence review of 20 studies, 75% of the papers found evidence of weight bias among exercise professionals, according to data published in the journal Obesity Reviews in 2018. That bias undermines the entire purported mission of the fitness industry, as other studies show that people who experience weight stigma quickly become less willing to participate in physical activity — regardless of their actual weight status.
“The certifications we do to become trainers are pretty inherently fat-phobic,” says Miriam Fried, a body-positive independent personal trainer in New York City. “You become a personal trainer with that as your education and background, and you have to look outside the fitness industry to find anything different.”
Fried started her career six years ago as a group fitness instructor in New York gyms, a world she describes as “pretty entrenched” in diet culture. “We were pushed to talk about bikini bodies and use weight loss as motivation. I was an employee; I had to do as I was told,” she tells me. I flash back to a barre class I attended a few years ago; as soon as she saw me, the teacher began to cheerily advise me on modifications suitable for “those of us with buns in the oven.” When I explained I wasn’t pregnant, she looked abashed but quickly covered with: “Well, what matters is you’re here to get your body back!” I soldiered through the class and never went back.
“I start from, ‘You’re okay today. Everything about you is sufficient.’ Because then there is so much more opportunity to be had.”
But in talking to Fried, I feel a new empathy toward that teacher, who, after all, was swimming in the same water as me, and for more hours a day. Fried says she also felt a tremendous amount of pressure to “maintain a certain body” while working in those places, an experience echoed by many other fitness professionals interviewed for this piece.
“There is definitely an image you need to project as a #fitpro. You have to be all the things, do all the crazy yoga poses, have the perfect Instagram, be super inspiring,” agrees Lisa Hobson Stoner, a yoga teacher who has also taught Pilates, kettlebell, boxing, and other group fitness classes in St. Paul, Minnesota. “I definitely struggled with reconciling myself and that image. But I also definitely chased it down.”
In the first few years of her fitness career, Hobson Stoner wouldn’t post food pictures on Instagram unless the meal was “totally clean and organic.” The very occasional post of say, a Saturday night burger and beer, could only run alongside the right hashtags: #Balance, #8020. “I spent the first two or three years of my career saying, ‘What is wrong with me? Why can’t I do what I see other people in the industry doing. Why can’t I get their results and look a certain way?’” she says. “And I knew there were studios that still wouldn’t hire me based on the way I looked.”
It’s worth noting that both Fried and Hobson Stoner are straight-sized. This means they’ve never directly experienced the full intensity of the fitness industry’s weight bias, a fact they both readily acknowledge. But it also means that the traditional path to #fitpro success seemed viable for them in a way it wouldn’t for someone who doesn’t even come close to meeting the industry’s physical ideals. “I am not a typical-looking personal trainer,” says Sasha Rose, a personal trainer in Sydney, Australia, who has pink hair and tattoos and lives in a larger body. “When we had to weigh ourselves in personal training school, I was pretty much the only person in my class to have an ‘obese’ BMI. And the others could ‘get away with it’ because they were so visibly muscular that it ‘didn’t count.’ Mine counted. I thought, ‘There is no way I can go into this industry at this size.’”
Rose began dieting and quickly developed a restrictive-eating disorder just by following the advice of colleagues. “I honestly believed I was just trying to be healthy,” she says now. “But the fitness industry is an orthorexia factory. We are teaching people how to develop eating disorders.”
When I ask Stanley about the pressure on fitness professionals to look a certain way and adhere to certain body-weight goals, I expect to hear a similar critique of the system. Instead, she’s impatient. “I think a lot of what fitness professionals process as ‘standards within the industry’ is actually their own internalized fat phobia,” she says. “It’s kind of hard for me whenever people are like, ‘I couldn’t get a job if…,’ because, like, you really could — you just don’t want to. I definitely think the pressure is real. But I also think contributing to the culture creates the problem. So, like, you can’t be surprised whenever your actions have the obvious outcomes.”
Stanley also says that for all the fear that fitness professionals have of being blacklisted for challenging the weight-loss paradigm, “really sticking to your guns and kind of going outside the box can be better for your career. It’s true that it’s hard to find sustainable work and income as a fitness professional, but it’s also true that if you are just part of the pack, nobody is going to be able to hear your individual voice.”
Rose agrees. Her turning point came once she discovered Health at Every Size (also known as HAES), a community of health professionals and activists who posit that health goals should be kept entirely separate from body weight. “It made so much sense, and it helped me realize there is another way to do this. My clients are not looking for someone with the personal trainer aesthetic. They are attracted to me because I’m an outspoken feminist who plays roller derby,” she says. “My business doubled once I understood that and once I got a lot clearer with my messaging — that I am a HAES provider, I don’t sell weight loss, and I respect your body autonomy.”
Hobson Stoner is trying to chart a similar path after deciding she needed to break up with the diet culture aspect of fitness when one of her yoga students asked her if half an apple had too much sugar in it. “I felt like even though I wasn’t the one selling her that specific program — that I was actually telling her to eat the whole fucking apple — that I was nevertheless complicit in some way,” she says. Now that Hobson Stoner has stopped engaging in weight-loss talk, posting her own metrics, and otherwise fueling her clients’ body-image insecurities, she says, “It finally feels like I’m doing my job with integrity.” But she did take an income hit by quitting one fitness center that refused to shift its messaging, and she feels lucky to have found another studio more receptive to her approach. “Your clients might get it and really love it. But the gyms have to hire you.”
CCharting the totally independent path, as Stanley has done by building her Instagram and collaborating with mostly niche brands, requires an investment of time and other resources that aren’t available to everybody. Most trainers working in fitness are dependent on large gym chains and other big fitness names to give them space to train and classes to teach. Big brands are certainly aware of body positivity in a way they weren’t even three to five years ago — but most continue to simultaneously endorse and celebrate weight loss in ways that are both subtle and screaming. Consider the toxic juxtaposition of Nike’s plus-size workout gear and “run like a girl” campaigns with its coaches’ abusive treatment of elite runners like Mary Cain. I’m also fascinated by Barre3, which is marketing its current January challenge around the hashtag #MyPresentTruth: “What if we let go of an unrealistic ideal and exercised just to be present and alive in our bodies?” It sounds so good that it almost makes me forget the not-so-distant past when the brand encouraged me to detox and drop pounds with its Barre3 Cleanse.
Perhaps the most complicated brand to parse is Peloton, which launched on Kickstarter in 2013 and was valued at $8 billion when it went public in September 2019. Peloton reinvented the notion of the home gym and thereby also redefined society’s concept of what a “safe fitness space” could be. Stanley has one. Ellen Degeneres has one. And Richelle Martin, a 37-year-old mom in Brisco, Texas, has one and loves it so much that she now heads up the XXL Tribe, which is organized and moderates by Peloton Members. (For the uninitiated: The Peloton is an exercise bike with a built-in computer that connects to the internet so you can participate in group spin classes and receive real-time feedback from instructors in the comfort of your own home. Devoted users often join “tribes” of like-minded people to build a virtual community.)
Is the fitness industry ready to create safe spaces across the board? It’s not clear that everybody even understands the question.
“We started as the group for larger riders, but we’re really so much more — we say XXL stands for Extra Extra Love Tribe now,” Martin says. “It’s a place to check in daily for support, motivation, accountability — and to just celebrate each other without the normal judgment that can happen to larger people when we’re out in the fitness world.”
Martin was 350 pounds when she got her Peloton. She had long since stopped going to gyms. “I’ve been told I needed to go to a ‘fat person’s gym.’ I had someone call me a fat lard. And I also worried that I might actually be exceeding the weight limit on their equipment,” she says. “It was a very uncomfortable environment to be in.”
In contrast, with Peloton, Martin says, she rides daily. “It’s the first time in my life I feel confident working out,” she says. Now here’s the kicker — and surely why Peloton’s public relations team selected Martin to be my interview subject: Her Peloton was a Mother’s Day gift from her husband. In case you missed it, that is almost the exact plot of Peloton’s 2019 holiday commercial, where a husband surprises his wife with a Peloton bike for Christmas and is then treated a year later to the video diary she has kept documenting how Peloton has “changed” her. The backlash was swift, and the company’s stock dropped 9% (a value of $942 million) in response. But: “I thought it was sweet, and I guess it resonated with me because it is my story,” Martin says when I ask for her take on the ad. “Everybody is saying it’s so terrible for a man to give a woman exercise equipment, but maybe she wanted it! Mine is the best gift my husband has ever given me. And yes, she’s thin, I get it, but I don’t care. Let’s celebrate her where she is.”
Peloton declined my requests to interview one of its executives or trainers. I was hoping to learn more about why the company made the ad the way it did, deliberately casting a thin actress to play Peloton Wife and never explicitly discussing weight loss. Is it our own biases that cause us to read “it changed me” as code for weight loss? Martin says yes. “I thought her change was taking the time for herself every day and creating a routine of self-love and self-care,” she tells me. “I don’t know why everybody jumped to weight.”
It’s also true that weight-loss talk seems to be less of a dominant theme in Peloton culture than in many other fitness environments. And Martin is eager to tell me how she celebrates every member of the XXL Tribe “wherever they are,” whether they’re pursuing a weight-loss goal or not. But, by the way, Martin absolutely is. She’s lost 50 pounds in 18 months of Peloton workouts and plans to lose 200 total. And when I ask if she would like to see Peloton increase the body diversity of their instructors — all of whom are impressively thin and toned — she says she doesn’t. “I get why people would think that, but I want to see my instructor be somebody who is healthy and fit, because I want to know that they know how to get there,” she says. “My favorite instructor right now used to be 250 pounds, and she looks amazing now. That inspires me and makes me want to work harder, because this girl knows what she’s doing, and if I listen to her, I can have the same journey.”
I really like my conversation with Martin, who is kind and smart and clearly passionate about helping others find their fitness bliss. It’s still difficult to reconcile her ability to recognize and call out the weight stigma she has experienced with her own weight-loss goals. And I’m stuck on the fact that someone with Martin’s talent for motivating and supporting others — not to mention her clear dedication to the workout itself — is the paying customer, rather than the industry leader; the disciple and not the guru. The fitness industry’s conflation of technical knowledge with thinness and thinness with celebrity status may be its biggest barrier to creating respectful and welcoming workout spaces for the rest of us.
“Being a trainer should be about more than having an aspirational lifestyle,” Hobson Stoner says. “It’s about building true connection with people. We might be one of the few people in someone’s life who actually believes in them. I don’t have to be the strongest or the thinnest person in the room to do that. I don’t need to live on salads and smoothies to be good at my job, because my goal is to make other people feel seen.”
We can blame ourselves for reading a weight-loss message into the Peloton commercial, or we can blame the brand for Easter-egging it in there for us. But what’s clearly missing from the video — and from too many fitness videos and gyms and yoga studios — is someone who looks like Martin and doesn’t see her body as a problem to solve.
https://elemental.medium.com/can-the-fitness-industry-and-body-positivity-coexist-408e7e0084dc
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