Am I Fit Enough Yet?

By Elizabeth Major on November 25, 2015 in Other

Summer is coming: dust the bikinis off, sign up to boot camp, detox your digestive system and go raw vegan paleo, because now is the time that the Eastern Suburbs will be the witness to your fitness down on the white sands of Bondi.

But what does it actually mean to be fit in this day and age? Is it enough to be able to deadlift 100kg, or run a kilometre in under five minutes? Sadly, no, it is not. The truth is, nobody cares if you can suspend your body horizontally from a street sign; if you don’t look like one of the #FitFam, all those pull-ups and leg lifts don’t mean squat.

The pressure to achieve the perfectly ‘Instagramable’ figure weighs upon the bony shoulder blades of young women from Maroubra to Bondi and beyond. I am humble enough to admit that I enjoy a touch of narcissism at this time of year. Between pole dancing and pump classes, I find myself constantly checking for new lines of definition, fixated on how flat my stomach can get and whether my hipbones are visible.

Recently, a man I barely know thought it would be okay to tickle my arm and tell me I have tuckshop arms. This man was no Adonis. He exists on the tenuous border between overweight and clinically obese. For some reason he is one of the many unfit men out there who think it is perfectly acceptable to criticise a fit girl for small imperfections with the unreasonable expectation that she will not be offended because “she knows she isn’t fat”. Of course, telling him that he should hold back on the muffin with his full cream latte for fear that he might soon encounter coronary failure would be incredibly rude.

And herein lies the crux of the #fitspo culture. We somehow think that demanding utter perfection is a good thing – it’s ‘fitspiration’. What if I went home and cried (I did), or made myself throw up after my next meal (I thought about it), or forced myself to do three hours of relentless exercise most days of the week to make up for all the carbs I consume in the form of fruit (I do)?

Don’t be worried, ladies, it’s all in the name of healthy living. It’s not manic if it’s organic. You can’t die if you’re eating the way nature intended. This is health and fitness; it could never be a dangerous, body-image-distorting societal pressure that is leading to a new eating disorder.

Bulimia is so teenager and anorexia belongs in high school – this is the fitness journey! It is a long but rewarding road to that ‘Instaperfect’ booty and, yes, it will take sweat and tears, though incidentally not blood. I mean, if you haven’t stopped your menstrual period through intermittent fasting, then you just aren’t trying hard enough. Body Mass Index is no real indication of health; it is all about Body Fat Percentage, and when it’s low enough that your boobs all but disappear, rest assured you can just buy new ones, because having the perfect body is what fitness is all about.