Fleet Street newspaper columnists are not, traditionally, the fittest specimens, unless you are measuring right arms well-developed at lifting mugs and shot glasses. The lady who has recently been writing The Guardian’s fitness column seems to have come up with a novel excuse not to let her current assignment make her too fanatical in practicing her ostensible subject:

Do you boast about your fitness? Watch out – you’ll unavoidably become rightwing Zoe Williams I’m not sure what exercise does for your body, but I do know what it does to your personality. And it’s not pretty … By 7am, someone had posted a picture of themselves doing a complicated yoga posture on a log, and I was as angry as a bull. The problem wasn’t the hashtagging; the problem is with fitness itself. I have been writing a fitness column for a year and in this time I’ve digested very little about what exercise does for your body. I still have to Google what counts as maximum-intensity every time I feel moved to talk about it, which is all the time – but I know everything about what it does to your personality, and none of it is pretty.

When it comes to nature and nurture, I suspect different fitness regimens are one area where nurture stands a chance, especially in regard to influencing political views.

The problem for making sense out of which fitness method to practice is that human biodiversity means that what works for one person might not work for another. (Similar complications help explain why diet advice is such a mess.)

[Comment at Unz.com]