Fat Girl Gym
Exercising as a fat woman
I recently joined a gym, and it’s a big step for me. Not joining a gym, I’ve done this before. But this one is fancy and expensive. Like, you can drop your dry cleaning off there fancy, towels are provided fancy, cucumber water fancy. I’m pumped. After a long debate with my budget, I decided it was a good investment. I recently got a pinched nerve in my neck, and my body is seizing up from long days at my desk and buckets of stress.
But the wind was taken from my sails when I was setting up my profile on the gym app. It had mandatory fields for weight and height, probably to calculate the BMI. You may be thinking “and?” but this is a massive hurdle for me and many others. I have spent years and years untangling the concept of exercise from the concept of weight loss. I’ve also had disordered eating in the past. I don’t know how much I weigh, nor do I want to.
This is a reminder that in a fatphobic society, going to the gym will always be seen as a way to get thin.
Unsolicited advice
As a fat woman, I have often been offered “advice” by gym-goers. Not trainers; not staff, but other patrons. I’ve had, mainly men, sidle up to me and tell me something I didn’t ask about; such as “A slight incline on the treadmill is better for your knees”
I think I am in the 1% of gymgoers who know how to use the rowing machine correctly, and yet somehow I manage to walk by someone hoofing the bar over the knees and say nothing to them. I manage to mind my own business.
What’s worse is the patronising compliments. Other gym-goers see me sweating, my face beetroot red, and assume I’m on some epic journey of self-improvement rather than the reality; I am chasing down a single drop of dopamine. I’ve had, mainly women, come up to me and say “You’re doing a great job” or “Keep going!” and it takes all my strength not to throw a dumbbell at them.
I don’t need your praise, I am not trying to squat my way into the Kingdom of Thinness, I am simply moving my body.
Lack of solicited advice
Something I’ve noticed in this new gym is also, the lack of advice. I know now you’re thinking “Oh too much advice, now too little” — but this is the first time I’ve started going to classes in the gym. I had always avoided them in the past because classes reminded me of PE. PE in school was truly nightmarish. I remember doing the 12-minute run and walking for 11 minutes and 45 seconds of it. Of course, at no point in PE was I taught how to run, technique, or endurance. No, it was just “run”. Imagine if we did that in other classes — “just do the maths!”. PE is a scam and while maybe you had a good PE teacher, no you didn’t you’re just naturally athletic.
But now I bravely go to classes in this new gym because it’s expensive and I am more afraid of not getting my total value for money than I am of anything else.
So I do them all, Zumba, Stretch and Tone, Body Pump, Spinning, etc. But while I’m too visible to other gym goers on the gym floor I seem invisible to the instructors. Only one instructor of the 8–10 I’ve sampled gave actual modifications in her class. Not every fat body needs modifications in a gym class, and not everyone who needs a modification is fat. But the point was she saw me struggling and did her job to instruct me how to do the class safely. But she is the exception. Most instructors ignore me. I have always been the fattest person in each class I go to, and perhaps they just don’t know what to do with me. But they should learn.
Jolly fat lady
The level of unfriendliness at the gym might be related to how fancy it is. I’ve been going to roughly the same weekly classes for 4 months and yet receiving a smile and a nod is a notable event. I’m constantly grinning at people like a chubby-cheeked child, with cold stares in response.
Maybe everyone is equally unfriendly to everyone else but I can’t help but wonder if my size has something to do with it.
There is also a correlation between unfriendliness with the seriousness of the class. In Zumba, there will be some smiles, but at body pump people set up their equipment as if preparing to bury a loved one. I know scientifically exercise makes you happy, but then please explain why everyone here seems so miserable.
Are you slim gym goers ok? Are you hungry? Maybe you’re hungry.
Exercise is not about the destination
In a world obsessed with thinness exercise is seen as a means to an end: the obtaining or maintenance of a thin body.
And in that, so much of the benefit of exercise is lost. When gyms are such hostile places for fat people we are given less opportunity to move. When nearly every trainer advertises their expertise through before and after photos showing their clients’ weight loss we get the message; our fatness should be fought. We should be trying to look like you. And the exercise we did was pointless if it didn’t result in weight loss.
This mindset has stolen the good of exercise from so many fat people. They dread going to the gym, set up a routine they hate, and after a month or two when they don’t see significant weight loss, they think well F**k this and stop altogether.
It is so clear to me that fat people are not wanted in gyms when something as simple as a larger body mannequin for sportswear causes such an outcry. OK so fat people should exercise but we shouldn’t have clothes to do it in? What do thin people want from us?
It's all relative
Everything is relative. In my experience at the gym 9 times out of 10 I’m the fattest person there. But I’m considered a “small fat”. I have no idea what I weigh but I’m a size 20–22 in Jeans. I sometimes can buy clothes in high street stores but often I can’t. I experience far less interpersonal and systemic discrimination than those in larger bodies. I experience street harassment but not regularly.
Nevertheless, this is my perspective on going to the gym as a fat person. I can only tell my story, and my solidarity is with fat people experiencing more discrimination than I do. I recognise as well my privilege as a white person, knowing that anti-fatness is rooted in anti-Blackness.
One Day
One day I’d love to open a gym for fat people and fat allies only. Where we can sweat unselfconsciously, spend half the class in child pose, and waddle out smiling. Until then I guess I’ll continue to go to the gym where it feels like I don’t belong.
