Repeat after me.

Size does not equal health.

Size does not equal health.

What size does equal are challenges. But guess what. Short people are challenged from seeing over a tall person, and probably have a hefty tailor bill to get their clothes altered. A tall person has to duck to get through the doorway and keep smiling through requests of reaching for things. A thin person, admittedly has a whole lot of privilege, but deals with name calling “eat a steak!” and more, I’m not thin so it’s all wild guesses here.

But a fat person gets a raw deal.

Clothes are hard to buy. Doctors want to weigh us to proceed through a sore throat complaint. People don’t want to sit next to us on the plane. We can’t go and buy an enormous donut to get us through period pain, because of silent and not so silent judgement. Should you be eating that? Tut tut.

But here’s the other challenge.

Fitness.

One of the many reasons fat people don’t exercise in a gym is the judgement. Or worse, the faux praise. “You’re in the right place, congratulations!” As if exercise was some sort of achievement level for fat people. Taking the first step towards exercise should be congratulatory for everyone. But because there is a deep set feeling that fat people shouldn’t exist in the space we take up, we get lots of congratulations because clearly we’re at the gym to make our bodies smaller, take up less space.

My industry is almost permanently spouting “Obesity is a killer!” “Get your weight to x amount, your BMI is too high!”

Nope.

What’s killing us and everyone else on the planet is inactivity. And a billion other things. But it isn’t just being fat.

Our bodies were designed to move.

And so if we just stop thinking about changing the weight of our body, or the size and shape of our body, and just get up off the damned couch and move, great things happen.

I know it’s hard.

We’ve been conditioned our whole lives to reduce our size and take up less space. We have weight loss on the brain. But actually, it needs to be health we focus on.

What’s important is a:

1) Sugar in blood metric - is type 2 coming for us?

2) Blood pressure metric - is our heart healthy?

3) Cholesterol metric - how much of the good do we have vs how much of the bad?

All of these things can be improved with exercise. And hydration. And sleep. And managing stress.

And sometimes those metrics are up the wazoo and we need more help to get it under control. Sometimes we are too far gone and where exercise is helpful, but we need more support. And that’s ok. Thin people, short people, tall people all could have metrics up the wazoo that need some attention. Fat people, it’s just assumed we’re on our way to an early grave. Spoiler alert! We all are, if we don’t move.

Three recent heart related deaths of people I know. Late thirties, mid forties, mid fifties. All people not fat, didn’t realise their hearts were about to pack in. We must exercise. Doesn’t have to be in a gym, but I like it there. Exercise at home, exercise at work, take the stairs if you can, get down on the floor and then get back up again and repeat it. Do it while you are watching Netflix.

This place - Fitness at any Size is a newsletter type blog thing you can sign up for if you want to read about size-inclusive, diet-free exercise for beginners. There’s loads of blogs and information for building your booty and the latest fad diet trick. But not so much information for people who just want to get strong, get moving, and improve their health with a health at any size approach.

I am a personal trainer and nutrition coach. You can check out my business online at www.sweatypals.nz or just follow me on twitter twitter.com/loudxx.

Thank you for reading if you got this far, please share this with your friends who may be interested.