What does it mean to be “fit” or “in shape”? You can ask different people and get different valid answers. If you’re familiar with my content and philosophy you might expect me to say something along the lines of “being in shape has nothing to do with the shape of your body,” but that’s not really true. There is lot more to being in shape than what you look like - so much more. Like, seriously a LOT more. But it’s also true that most of us do care about how we look because we are social animals. So, from my perspective “fitness” is primarily and mostly about function, but there’s also room to care about appearance. I don’t want anyone to be shamed for their appearance, but judging someone because they care about their own appearance is also shaming them.
How You Look
The problem with using aesthetics to define “fitness” or “in shape” is not that it’s shallow or vain. The problem is that aesthetics don’t work as an operable decision-making framework. Most potential customers and clients of the fitness industry want to “lose weight” which typically translates into “lose fat” because it’s not the muscle, bone, and organs that’s bad for their health or appearance.
People want to lose weight either because they think it will improve their health or because they think it will improve their appearance. Most people think both. Let’s say you set a goal of losing 40 pounds (18kg) because you want to look and feel better. The 40 pound (18kg) number is a guess - it’s a number we pick based on epidemiological data (e.g. BMI charts), our own memory of our past selves (how much you weighed in high school/college/before kids), or some other source. What actually happens if and when those 40 pounds (18kg) are gone is uncertain: maybe you think you still need to lose more, maybe you think you look frail and gaunt, or maybe you only lose a fraction of the 40 pounds (18kg) and feel like you failed even though you’ve improved your long-term health prospects and your friends and neighbors say “you’re looking great!”
Thinking about changes to our bodies in terms of pounds and inches (or kg and cm as I prefer to use from atop my hoity toity metric ivory tower) doesn’t really tell you when you’ve “arrived”. It ends up being either an unreachable goal or else a moving goalpost - which is great for a fitness industry that preys on insecurity and harmful for most everyone else.
How You Function
This is why there has been a shift to encourage people to prioritize what they can do over how they look. Here are some unglamorous but pragmatic examples:
- Get off the floor without using your hands.
- Carry all the groceries in one trip and up the stairs.
- Play three sets without your knee complaining.
- Spend a Saturday in the yard without back pain.
- Be the person on the hike who isn’t the reason everyone stops.
The cool thing about this is that you get to pick the list: what are the things that are important to you? You might be OK with “carrying groceries” or you might really want to be able to do 15 pull-ups or through-hike a thousand miles of trail. None of these are wrong: you get to choose the functions that you want to be able to perform and then train for them.
This is great because a list of functional things you want to be able to do is testable and you know when you’ve really achieved it, at which point you can say “good work me. I’m done,” or you can add more things to the list. It also gives you clarity on what you need to do in order to achieve those things. When you chase aesthetics you tend to get bogged-down and pulled in different directions - which again is the business model of the fitness industry because it makes you a long lifespan customer.
Putting it Together
There’s been a trend among well-meaning body-positivists to encourage people to focus on what they can do rather than on how they look. This rhetoric can downplay, invalidate, and shame people’s understandable desire to look their best. Now people feel bad about how they look and feel bad about feeling bad about how they look.
The distinction I want to make here is that it’s valid and fine to care about all of it, but that it’s better to steer your decisions based on your functional goals. Training to improve your capability will frequently change how you look in a way that you’ll like.
If you let appearance concerns drive your exercise and nutrition decisions, I have exciting new for you: you’ve just entered the sport of bodybuilding. The reason most people don’t look like bodybuilders is the same reason most people aren’t other kinds of professional athletes: only a tiny fraction of us have enough talent and enjoy it enough to put in the work required to excel.
The thing about appearance that gets overlooked by fitness-minded people is that you can change your appearance in a lot of ways without actually changing your body. Your clothes, your attitude, your hair - there’s a lot of things that reflect who you are other than your body dimensions. And listen, I know with high level of confidence that I am not the dude you want to be getting your fashion and beauty advice from. I’m just saying that these things are possible and accessible. And that it’s OK to work on improving your self-image from the outside in as well as from the inside out.
Action
Write down five things you’d like to be capable to do that are specific enough to test. Then, think about whether the training you’re currently doing is getting you closer to them or not.
Then, write down five things you can do that have nothing to do with diet or exercise that will improve your assessment of your own appearance: clothes, hair, cosmetics, whatever. Again, I’m not giving out specific advice here - you’d be better off asking my dog, he already thinks you look great.
If you’re struggling with how to make your list of capabilities a reality, that’s where I can help.