Beth Garrabrant. Styling, Rachael Wang. Set Design, Elysia Belilove at Born Artist. Hair, Hair by Susy. Makeup, Brittany Whitfield at The Only Agency. Manicure, Arlene Hinckson at The One Agency. On Jessamyn: Aerie Bodysuit.
In 2016, Sarah Jaffe joined a gym in the San Francisco Bay Area. Jaffe, then 32, was a longtime endurance athlete who’d just returned from a seven-day cycling event, biking 550 miles from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Needless to say, her fitness regime was well-established—but at that point, a little boring. So when the gym offered her a free session with one of their trainers (as many do with new members), she accepted. It would be a great chance to amplify her routine with a pro. She filled out an intake form, detailing her fitness history and goals, then discussed it at length with the trainer. She was focused on strength and mobility, she explained, and was eager to incorporate some new workouts into her endurance training.
“Great!” the trainer replied. “So do you know what a calorie is?”
Well, yes, Jaffe said, confused. She had to be very specific about caloric and nutritional intake when cycling 80 miles per day. During that endurance ride. That she’d just done. “Okay!” the trainer said, though something still seemed off. The trainer took Jaffe to the weights (finally), and handed her a two-pound dumbbell.
Jaffe laughed as she recounted the story to me—and it is almost comical, imagining this seasoned athlete staring down at a two-pound dumbbell while a trainer tries to “teach” her what a bicep curl is. The session continued as such, Jaffe recalls, with her asking about functional exercises and the trainer instead demonstrating a squat. “I kept having to reiterate, ‘I know what these things are. I want you to give me something new, so I don’t get bored.’” Though she’d been very clear on her goals, the trainer seemed to have another one in mind:
“You do know that you need to eat fewer calories than you burn,” she said, “in order to lose weight.”
“What makes you think I want to lose weight?” Jaffe asked. “I didn’t put that on my intake form.” The trainer said she’d assumed as much because of Jaffe’s “curvier” physique. One last time, Jaffe—who was then a size 16—explained that she was there to support her endurance training. It was literally there, in writing.
The trainer seemed flummoxed. “So you did those things you wrote on your form?”
Though bizarre, Jaffe’s experience is hardly novel. Of the dozens of people I spoke with for this story, few could identify one specific incident of anti-fat bias in a fitness space that stood out more than others—because incidents like this are the rule, not the exception. As Jaffe herself points out, she’s on the smaller end of the plus-size spectrum: “I definitely have some privilege there in even feeling comfortable advocating for myself,” she says. “If I, as a size 16, am getting that treatment, I don’t even want to think about how she’s treating the rest of her clients.”
In truth, many trainers have never had a client larger than Jaffe. Lots of fat folks (especially those who’ve been classified with the damning label of “severe” or “morbid” obesity), simply don’t go to gyms or exercise classes—even those who very much want to. The widespread consensus on fat people is that they are lazy, ignorant gluttons who simply will not get off the couch and get on the treadmill. The lesser-known reality is that treadmills typically have weight limits between 200 and 300 pounds (as do many bikes, stair-climbers, and other common gym types of equipment). Then there’s the dearth of activewear, the majority of which is not produced in plus sizes (Nike, for example, started adding plus items in 2017). Fitness is already a practice of the privileged; it requires time, money, and access that many people don’t have. Fat people have to jump those hurdles and more just to get to the gym. And when they do, they’re often met with judgment, discrimination, and calorie lectures they didn’t ask for. The problem keeping fat people out of the gym is not their fatness. The problem is fatphobia.
Beth Garrabrant. Styling, Rachael Wang. Set Design, Elysia Belilove at Born Artist. Hair, Hair by Susy. Makeup, Brittany Whitfield at The Only Agency. Manicure, Arlene Hinckson at The One Agency. On Jessamyn: Shirt, Sarah Aprhodite. Shorts, Aerie. Socks, American Apparel.
Beth Garrabrant. Styling, Rachael Wang. Set Design, Elysia Belilove at Born Artist. Hair, Hair by Susy. Makeup, Brittany Whitfield at The Only Agency. Manicure, Arlene Hinckson at The One Agency. On Jessamyn: Shirt, Sarah Aprhodite. Shorts, Aerie. Socks, American Apparel.
Though the term “fatphobia” only went mainstream in recent years with the rise of the body positivity movement (and has already fallen out of favor for some), anti-fat bias has been a part of white America for centuries.
“There’s a long history in this country of equating fitness with health and health with morality,” Danielle Friedman, author of Let’s Get Physical, a study of modern fitness culture, tells SELF. “And vice versa.” Thinness was not always deemed fit or healthy, but from the country’s earliest days, it was a sign of piety, moral fortitude, and racial “purity.” Thinness and fatness became medical metrics in the early 20th century when the advent of modern epidemiology and sanitation led to a drastic drop in infectious-disease deaths, a corresponding rise in life expectancy, degenerative illness, and the explosive growth of the life-insurance industry. To make a long, complex story very short: People were suddenly interested in quantifying health, and life insurance companies promoted the use of weight tables (though they differed greatly from company to company) to do so. In a matter of decades, fatness evolved from a moral issue to a medical one.
Two world wars and a Red Scare later, our shifting views on fatness collided with another novelty: the concept of physical fitness. The modern fitness industry as we know it, Friedman says, began to emerge in the 1950s. Before that, she explains, “the medical community was ambivalent about exercise. There was this belief that it could be dangerous. There was more fear about overexerting yourself than underexerting yourself.” There was no mainstream fitness culture; gyms were for meatheads and athletes, not average Joes (definitely not Janes). But midcentury Americans were living far more sedentary lifestyles than their predecessors—who may not have been healthier, but between the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression, and the deadliest war in human history had certainly lived harder. Now millions of their children were sprawled out in the suburbs, driving home from desk jobs to eat food bought at supermarkets. As the Cold War brewed in the background, so did a growing anxiety that Americans were going “soft,” inside and out. In 1960, weeks before his inauguration, President-elect John F. Kennedy affirmed this fear in an essay published in Sports Illustrated titled “The Soft American.” “Our growing softness, our increasing lack of physical fitness,” he wrote, “is a menace to our security.”
This is the turning point when fitness became thin, hard, and estimable—a sign of moral and mental fortitude—and softness became its opposite. (Friedman cites the enduring issue of “flabphobia,” the insidious sidekick of fatphobia, that underpins concepts like “spot training” and “skinny fat.”) Back then, as now, Friedman says, fitness came to mean fat-less: “It’s [not] enough to just be small and thin. You have to be totally devoid of fat.”
It still took time for the idea of exercise-for-health to become a cultural norm, according to Friedman. Specifically, it was in the 1970s that fit, lean, and healthy—three distinct concepts—all merged into one. By then, Friedman explains, “it was taken to mean that those who exercised—or even those who looked like they exercised and were ‘fit’—were healthy,” while those who remained “soft,” whether or not they exercised, were deemed unwell. “That’s when things were off and running.”
Half a century later, this novel idea—that fitness is something lean, virtuous, and measured by the scale—has settled into our cultural consciousness. Fitness has gone from a niche subculture to a vast, global industry valued at nearly $100 billion in 2019, according to the Global Health & Fitness Association.
Beth Garrabrant. Styling, Rachael Wang. Set Design, Elysia Belilove at Born Artist. Hair, Hair by Susy. Makeup, Brittany Whitfield at The Only Agency. Manicure, Arlene Hinckson at The One Agency. On Jessamyn: Bra, Jonesy. Bottoms, Sherrie Gold Swim. Sneakers, Nike.
There’s another concept we didn’t really hear about in the ’50s that gets a lot of play today: obesity. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) defines obesity as “weight that is higher than what is considered healthy for a given height” and positions it as being in the middle of a spectrum ranging from “overweight” to “extremely obese.” Between 1960 and 2012, the rate of obesity in U.S. adults increased about 20%, according to the CDC. (Though, depending on race and gender, there’s significant variation in both the statistics and the volume of data.) Concern over this matter escalated when, in 1998, the NIH tweaked its Body Mass Index classifications, lowering the cutoff for “healthy” weight from 27.3 (for women) or 27.8 (for men) to 25. Overnight, nearly 30 million Americans went from a-okay to soft, sick aberrations—symptoms of the epidemic ravaging this great nation.
BMI is a hotly debated metric (with a truly baffling and racist history too detailed to summarize here) that divides a person’s weight by their height to spit out a number. This number, the CDC stresses, “does not diagnose the body fatness or health of an individual.” Nevertheless, BMI has still become a core metric by which many of us measure the fatness and health of the country—and ourselves.
It’s no surprise then that fitness rhetoric puts so much emphasis on weight and comparatively little on other vitals, let alone things like lifestyle, family history, access to food and health care, activity level, or stigmatization—all of which we know have a significant influence on health. In fact, there’s a growing stack of studies indicating that fatphobia is damaging fat people’s health and actually preventing them from engaging in exercise.
“There are a lot of ways that people in fat bodies have learned that exercise is not for people that look like them,” Angela Meadows, Ph.D., who studies the role of weight stigma on health and fitness, tells SELF. Sometimes it’s overt: bullying, stereotyping, being patronized by fitness professionals trying to explain the concept of a calorie. Enmeshed with weight loss as it is, many modern fitness environments are inherently hostile to fat bodies, treating them as “before” photos. Having absorbed these biases from the earliest age (researchers have studied fatphobia in children as young as three) it’s much harder for a fat person to look past those side-eyes and walk into the gym, or even believe they can exercise. So, many don’t, Dr. Meadows says. “And they continue to believe it because they never get to prove to themselves that they can.”
Even those who manage to break this vicious cycle still swim against a relentless tide of fitness fatphobia, which also shows up in less visible ways: the dearth of plus-size sportswear (and the increased price tag some brands tack onto their plus items), the limited weight capacity on many exercise machines (not to mention the frames and seats that are painfully small for some in larger bodies), and the comparatively tiny number of visible fat fitness role models—who are often called out, not for advocating an active lifestyle, but rather for “promoting obesity.”
“That’s the biggest one,” Latoya Shauntay Snell, a marathoner and fitness influencer known to many online as the Running Fat Chef, tells SELF. “It gets under my skin,” she says of the phrase that routinely appears in her Instagram comments. “Just living and breathing and thriving in the space, as myself, is ‘promoting obesity.’”
Snell has been running and blogging since 2013—a time when mainstream culture was suddenly interested in body positivity, but mostly as it applied to thin, white people. Snell, who is neither, hasn’t seen the needle move all that much since then. Over 200 races in, she still gets heckled from the sidelines, or “encouraged” by those who see her as a struggling newbie: Keep going! Don’t quit! Don’t worry girl, if you keep that up, you’ll lose some weight! “We’ve moved a step in the right direction, but fatphobia is still there,” Snell says. “We’re just uncovering it.”
Change is happening; the growing popularity of influencers like Snell is part of that. Athletes like powerlifter Meg Boggs, trainers and instructors like those on SELF’s Future of Fitness advisory board, exercise groups like Fat Girls Hiking—we do have fat fitness role models now. And where there are influencers, brands will follow. A handful of major activewear brands, including Nike, Athleta, and Under Armour, now offer some pieces in plus sizes. But popular activewear brands often don’t stock these items in stores, and few go above a size 3X. When pressed on the issue of inclusive sizing, the party line from many mainstream retailers is often that it’s just too expensive. New fit models, new patterns, and all that “extra” fabric—phew, it’s a lot! But in 2020, one brand—Superfit Hero—made the bold pivot to plus-only clothing. Why? Because plus-size exercisers were their best customers.
Micki Krimmel founded Superfit Hero in 2015 with a line that ran from XS-5X. In 2019, while reviewing sales data, Krimmel realized that most of their repeat customers were in the plus range—“something like 95%,” she says. After interviewing a number of shoppers, she realized why: “It became obvious really quickly that the problems we were solving for plus-size consumers were very different than the ones we were solving for straight-size consumers,” she explains. Straight-size shoppers said they liked the pockets or the fabrics. Plus shoppers broke down crying, saying how grateful they were to be able to play their sport or do their workout in comfortable, appropriate clothing. For them, “it’s life-changing,” Krimmel says, “It’s access.” Superfit Hero was serving a vast and virtually untapped market. Krimmel and her team decided to drop the smaller sizes and produce their line only in sizes 12-42. The pivot paid off, and not just in sales: Instagram engagement jumped 1,000% within a week of launching the new size range, Krimmel says. Press coverage picked up. For the first time, major retailers began reaching out. Early this year, Superfit Hero is launching a partnership with Kohl’s—a milestone for the brand and its customers. “This is going to be the very first time that people can go in-store, in a major retailer, and try on size 6X and 7X in activewear,” Krimmel says.
In the grand scheme of things, these are still small steps. For fitness to be truly inclusive, it will require many more practical changes: redesigned machines, much more visibility and opportunity for plus-size fitness models, multiple activewear brands selling 7X clothing. Beyond that, it will require a fundamental shift in our understanding of fitness, health, and weight. “Most of us have been taught to believe that the only reason to exercise is for weight loss,” Dr. Meadows explains. “And we’ve been taught that in order to exercise for weight loss, it has to look like Jillian Michaels screaming at some poor fat woman crying her eyes out and puking over the side of a treadmill on The Biggest Loser. Otherwise, it’s not real exercise; it’s not worth it.”
But it is. Current data indicate that the majority of deliberate weight-loss attempts don’t work long-term, and the weight-cycling that often occurs can create health risks. But there’s also a wealth of data demonstrating that exercise has a hugely positive impact on health and longevity—regardless of weight change. Several studies, including a 2014 Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases meta-analysis specifically assessing fitness versus fatness, found that fit people in the obese and overweight categories had the same mortality risk as fit people who fell into the normal BMI range. That same analysis found that “unfit individuals had twice the risk of mortality regardless of BMI.” Thus, the researchers advised, physicians and public health officials should pivot their focus from weight loss to physical activity and fitness interventions.
Anecdotally, some have. “I was one of those people!” Dr. Meadows adds. Prior to her current work, Dr. Meadows worked in “weight management” services for the U.K.’s National Health Service. She has a Master’s on the subject. It wasn’t until she found the research on fitness and weight stigma that she understood the fundamental flaw in pushing weight loss for health. “In my experience, the majority of people with scientific training can be swayed pretty effectively by giving them good evidence,” she says.
Between the scientists, the influencers, the trainers, and the brands, we may have the critical mass necessary for the next step: legislation. That, Dr. Meadows says, is how paradigm shifts really happen—and they have happened in other realms, both in regard to public health (smoking regulation, seat belts) and systemic prejudice (marriage equality, voting rights). Historically, “opinion change follows legislation change,” Dr. Meadows says. It’s not that homophobia and smoking ceased to exist as soon as laws were passed. And there will always be segments of society who rail against government mandates (see: wedding-cake lawsuits, anti-vaccine rallies). But that kind of pushback “becomes non-normative” as policy makes certain behaviors less socially sanctioned. Anti-discrimination legislation can’t change hearts and minds and actions overnight, “but what it can do is change what’s considered acceptable behavior in society,” Dr. Meadows says.
For instance, take educational and workplace weight-based discrimination. There is no federal law (nor any state law, except for one in Michigan) prohibiting it. It is perfectly legal, for example, to pay fat employees less than thin ones for identical work. It’s legal for colleges to reject significantly more fat students than thin ones with equivalent applications. It’s legal for middle-school teachers to give children lower grades as they gain weight, despite no change in test scores or academic performance. According to research analyzed by The UConn Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity, these are examples of weight-based discrimination that are if not acceptable, at least far too common. However, The Center also notes that nearly 80% of Americans support legislation addressing weight discrimination. More cities are implementing their own local legislation barring weight discrimination, but what we really need is sweeping change.
In a world where size is not used as a measurement of intelligence, competence, or mental stability, it might be possible to stop using it as a measurement of fitness too. If fat children and adults were valued and welcomed in workplaces and schools, they might feel safer (and more capable) walking into workout class or entering a race. If anti-fatness rather than fatness itself were deemed shameful and ignorant, the fitness industry would very likely be a different place—one accessible and beneficial to many more people than it is today.
Beth Garrabrant. Styling, Rachael Wang. Set Design, Elysia Belilove at Born Artist. Hair, Hair by Susy. Makeup, Brittany Whitfield at The Only Agency. Manicure, Arlene Hinckson at The One Agency. On Jessamyn: Bodysuit, Good American Bodysuit. Tights, We Love Colors.