A reader yesterday asked a question that comes up a lot for me. She asked if, like the very small percentage of people who are able maintain weight loss, I might be an anomaly… that most obese people are not capable of my athleticism.

It’s possible that my athleticism is the result of my being a physical anomaly, but I seriously doubt it. First of all, while the reader asked me the question respectfully, often this is a way to solve cognitive dissonance while avoiding questioning one’s personal stereotypes. People see a fat person being athletic and instead of questioning their stereotypes about fat people and athleticism, they chalk it up to the athletic fatty being an “anomaly” and hold onto their preconceived notions and whatever it is that those stereotypes buy for them.

The comparison to weight loss doesn’t hold. Current intentional weight loss methods have been thoroughly tested for decades and they have a very long track record of failure. Athleticism in fat people have rarely been tested at all but in the existing research activity leads to improved health although not to weight loss. Unfortunately we spend so much time trying to figure out how to make fat people thinner that we neglect to look at what would make fat people healthier.

Let’s examine what our culture does:

tell fat people several times a day, every day, that they can’t be athletic

Make sure that they never see anyone who looks like them who is athletic

Act super surprised that fat people aren’t athletic

Point to the lack of fat athletes as evidence of the unlikelhood

That is messed up.

So if I am an anomaly, I don’t think that it’s my physical characteristics. I think it’s my ability to ignore the hundreds of thousands of negative messages that I get from society every day and just be an athlete anyway. And let’s not pretend that I’m the only one – there are tons of fat athletes. Unfortunately you don’t see us that often right now because every time someone puts us in the media they have to deal with the truly ridiculous accusation that they are “promoting obesity”.

I hear a lot that bodies just aren’t “meant” to carry [insert some random amount of weight], or that it’s just too much for the joints of fat people. I think that the human body is an amazingly adaptable thing. Look at professional athletes. There are joint issues with very tall bodies but we aren’t telling the NBA to shut it down. Thin people have join issues and there are protocols that treat them that do not involve weight loss. Those protocols involve looking at muscle tightness and imbalance and movement patterns among other things. I’ve had joint pain at various times and various weights and it has always been solved by fixing the mechanical issues that exist around the joint and they have never been solved through weight loss.

To be clear, if you are looking for better health, then based on the research about 30 minutes about 5 days a week ought to do it – walking, dancing in your living room, whatever. If you want to take that farther because you are interested in a sport or athletic achievement of some sort then you probably need to do a little planning . Physical fitness is based on three pillars – strength, stamina, and flexibility. Each sport needs these things in different combinations. Then you have the skills/techniques for whatever your particular sport is. No matter what you weigh, if you are new to a sport you want to make sure that you have the necessary baseline fitness which will help prevent injuries. My friends who work in emergency rooms talk about all the injuries that come in when the weather warms up and people in their thirties, forties, and fifties decide to get back into sports all at once. If you haven’t played soccer since you were seven, you probably don’t want to join a spirited pick up match tomorrow. But consider the fact that it’s not because of your weight, but because of your baseline fitness. When I give classes to the teachers at dance studios, often they will make assumptions about the abilities of their fat students. My rule is that you have to examine the problem and exhaust strength, stamina, flexibility and technique before they even THINK of blaming an issue on weight.

Look, nobody has a moral, social, or personal obligation to exercise. You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to, I’m not going to judge you and nobody else has the right to. But I am damn tired of so many things being blamed on body size without proof. And I think it’s unconscionable that fat people are warned away from something that actually is shown to make us healthier, while being inundated with the message that we MUST do something that is shown to lead to worse health. But let’s not pretend that fathletes are unicorns. We do exist and there are a bunch of us and there’s no reason to believe that you can’t be one too if you want.

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