As said before in my previous article, Health & Wellness: Mental, Physical, and Emotional Well-being “Your body is your temple, and the more you worship it, the better you do”. But that might make people think, are they going in the right direction with their body? Are they doing what it is that they are doing to look a certain way, or to please themselves? That’s when the differences between Body Positivity and Fitness Aesthetics get introduced in many people’s lives without their knowledge.
Body positivity’s literal meaning relies on making the body feel good. As in embracing your own needs, and the way your own body works. It might not be 100% correct, but for the most part, not only does it make you feel good, but it also helps you do good. One might feel good being physically active 24/7 yet not feel even slightly thrown off when a lazy day comes around, and another might be paranoid and keep hitting the reset button to begin their new way of reaching their body goals, as they are told by their favorite influencer that what they are doing is wrong.
That’s when fitness aesthetics come into the game; aesthetics is beauty, and many in today’s time see beauty in fitness as well. I, for one, see it as something that gets me downright dirty to achieve a look in mind, while others see fitness as a means to reach something that is not necessary or possible. For example, getting rid of hip dips. A hip dip workout is done to remove the dip in the bone for many women, which is not possible in the first place, as that is the anatomy that cannot be changed by exercise or any other means of fitness other than surgery itself. So, the question comes: how did fitness turn into an aesthetic? It is rotting the brains of young minds to look a certain way to meet a specific beauty standard.
Looking at my bodily structure and the way my favorite celebrities look, I don’t look like them, nor will I ever look like them, yet a YouTuber is telling me that I can achieve this look if I just do her workouts. But instead, my weight has decreased, my hips don’t look like hers, my waist isn’t defined like they made me think it would, so what exactly is happening here? Influencers are making money off of their naive viewers who think that following a fitness aesthetic will make them body positivity, which is certainly not what’s going to happen. Instead, they fall through this endless trap of one person online saying you should eat chia seeds, they help with digestion, and another saying don’t eat chia seeds, they are risky to put in your body.
So, what is this new dialogue I am trying to convey? Be realistic. I know I can never have an hourglass waist because I’m simply not built that way. When I was stick-thin, my waist didn’t look like that, so why do I think I can achieve what a fitness influencer is telling me, though her waist doesn’t look hourglass at all? Misinformation about the body is spreading fast, and this is a serious threat looming over the heads of our young generations. Who is giving these influences a license to make us believe that we can do something that we clearly cannot? Why aren’t more people asking questions as to how one person can look different in so many thumbnails, telling us we can achieve the look they have, which seems to change every few months? Are they shapeshifters whose bones change whenever they want?
Really, what it’s all coming down to is how we, as the public, treat it. For example, on YouTube whenever we click a video of a “fitness influencer” we give them a view, and when thousands of people are doing the same thing they get thousands of views, you and I might realize the bullshit within the very first minutes of the video, but someone else online might just see the amount of views the video has gathered and take that as sign of the influencer doing something right. That’s where the threat starts. What we think is a simple click is harmless, but what we are not understanding is that we are doing exactly what these individuals want us to do: talk about them, show them to our friends, making potentially millions look into their accounts. So, what should we do?
In China, there is now a law that requires people online to have medical credentials to be able to give health tips to people online. I cannot think of the number of times I foolishly believed something would help me when it did quite literally the opposite. Our government needs to move on to platforms like Instagram and YouTube, where most of the naive audiences are, and penalize those who are taking advantage of their audiences. This can help our country move in a positive direction. Fitness would no longer be a matter of aesthetics but rather body positivity. So, the next time you get your yoga mat ready to get the body moving, try asking yourself, does your workout routine cater to your own personal needs, or rather, the ‘person’ next to you?
