We’ve all had this experience: We’re in the grocery store, waiting patiently in the check out line. We scan the magazines perched on the end-cap racks. Our eye falls on the mostly-naked, bizarrely top-heavy, super-buff “fitness model” grinning from the cover of a “woman’s magazine,” the headline of which screams:

A BODY LIKE THIS IN 6 WEEKS!

I’ve seen it a million times, but I always feel the same way – a complicated mixture of anger, frustration, incredulity, sadness, and amusement. And I always think the same thing: Do they think we’re retarded?

Women do not naturally have 5% bodyfat. Even less natural is a woman with 5% bodyfat and double-D breasts. Yet that is exactly what we see held up to us as the ideal physique. But even more obvious is that even with all the personal training, drugs, and plastic surgery one could stand, it’s impossible to get this unnatural physique in 6 weeks.

Is this a news flash? No, of course not, unless you have lived in a cave your whole life or are under the age of 12. Which is precisely why the acceptance and prevalance of this ideal bothers me so much. In a word: women know we are being compared to and judged against an impossible standard, which works only to our disadvantage, yet we accept it anyway.

Now, before you assume I am saying “Yes, we must be retarded,” read on.

It’s way more complicated than that. I could rant about how and why, but I’d run out of bandwidth. So let me give you the Reader’s Digest version: Unrealistic ideals prey on human insecurities. Centuries of viewing women as primarily sexual objects has created expectations for us with that focus. Western women are cultural creatures like everyone else; if we are taught directly or indirectly a certain thing all our lives, it works its way into our emotional being. Our brain says “no” but our insecurities say “yes.” Or at least sigh, “ok.”

It’s time to say “no.” Not just “no” but “Fuck no.”

This fight-the-power sentiment may not seem like much of a news flash, either. We modern women all pay it lip service, then go buy the magazine (and the fat burners, the diet food, the Thigh Masters, etc.).

So let’s try this again. Fuck that shit. OK, once more with feeling.

Once you get in the habit of it, you’ll be amazed by how addictive exercising (ha) your power of choice is.

But be careful. That one small flame of defiance may ignite a firestorm of cultural insubordination. You may experience disconcertingly increased feelings of inherent self-worth, and find yourself saying “Fuck no” to all kinds of things you never knew you hated so much, like unequal pay, belittling Significant Others, and stillettos.

Now that we have established The Power Of No, a word of clarification: Thou shalt not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Rejection of ridiculous physical ideals doesn’t mean rejection of fitness. A weak woman has trouble rejecting much of anything.

And please, all you intellecktooel women out there, resist the delusion that you don’t need fitness because your body is separate from your mind. It just ain’t true. If your body is dying, your mind and heart are not far behind.

Uppity Fit is not about vanity or narcissism. It’s being committed to caring for your own self as much as you do others. “Please put on your own oxygen mask before assisting your child.” So ditch the martyrdom, it looks like hell on you.

Uppity Fit is not about feeling good because you look better than someone else. It’s about coming to realize that you do not need to be approved of – a.k.a. the euphemism “desired” – by someone else in order to feel worthy.

Uppity Fit is not about exact bodyfat percentages, scale numbers and clothing sizes. It is not the end result. It is the process of becoming fit that heals you.

Uppity Fit is about giving a serious shit about your physical health because your quality of life depends on it.

Can you do all this through fitness? Fuck yes.

[tags]fitness, women’s health, strong women say fuck, women’s magazines, sexism, really painful shoes[/tags]