What’s wrong with exercising?

Mod response:

Nothing, for people who want to do it, who enjoy doing it. But not everybody wants to, not everybody enjoys it, and not everybody can do it.

You know how you’re supposed to get an endorphin rush out of exercising? I don’t. And many of the usual exercises – especially walking – are actively painful for me, because I have bad knees and asthma that’s triggered by exercise. Generally, your body experiences pain because what you’re doing is damaging to it. I’ve found a couple of forms of exercise that don’t hurt me and do give me an endorphin rush – yoga, swimming – and those I do when I can. But I do them because I enjoy them.

The real problem, in general, is the idea that people must exercise, that we somehow have an obligation to do so, that we have an obligation to be healthy. And that’s pure shit. There is no ethical requirement to be healthy – indeed, no blanket definition of health that is not ableist and problematic – nor one to exercise. Shaming people because they do not exercise is a shitty thing to do. It’s none of your fucking business whether they exercise or not.

-MG