I constantly fall prey to fitness challenges and trends where people are looking to make their body look or feel a certain way. I would like to think of myself as ~mostly~ body-positive en it comes to my own body, but there are way too many days where I do not feel good about it and hope that these challenges will change that about me.
Most recently, I saw everyone on the internet, and in real life do Chloe Ting’s two-week shred. This is a two-week workout challenge based on high-intensity cardio and bodyweight based strength training. It guaranteed weight loss and muscle definition and that is exactly what I saw in lots of the people that participated. All the defined ab lines and curvier waists made me feel insecure that I didn’t have any and got me thinking about the challenge more.
During the same period, I had chosen to go a different route. Blogilates’ May Calendar was separated into four challenges, abs, glutes, arms, and legs, one for each week of the month. For each challenge, you were encouraged to take before and after photos and follow up with the differences you saw. As someone who does work out regularly, I didn’t feel much soreness and did not struggle through most of the workouts, but I believed in the plan and was highly disappointed when the results were little to none. I did feel good about working out so regularly and I was happy to have the structure, but it was just so frustrating to see that I was not able to see results that people around me did.
This got me thinking, I did what the plan said; drink a lot of water, sleep well, and eat clean but my body was not built according to a plan. As a petite person, I have always struggled to put on weight especially in the form of muscle, and the only time I had achieved that was through weight training. So there remained the important question of why I was expecting things from my body which were unrealistic based on what a Pilates instructor can achieve with her own body type and lifestyle. This meant that I needed to stop comparing myself to the people who have what I considered to be an ideal body and work on my own.
I obviously had some ideas, of who I wanted to look like based on how small I am and how happy I would have been to achieve that. I wanted to have abs like the Hadid sisters while being super strong and also doing this all without weights at home. But I soon came to realize that my fitness idols do not all look the same not all of them put in the same amount of work and not all of them are working hard to achieve the same goals. @whitneysimmons, @tallyrye, @laurabiceps, and @wellness_ed all fitness queens on their own journeys, and I needed to find my own as well. I realized I needed to find a way to save myself from the torture of constantly thinking that I have to look one way without focusing on how I was feeling.
I am now working on creating my own notions of fitness and health to suit how I feel mentally and physically and not just how I look. People like Lizzo and Ashley Graham have proven themselves to be some of the strongest women even though they didn’t fit into the conventional norm of fit, and I want to do that at the underweighted end of the spectrum. I want to be able to look in the mirror any day of the week regardless of how much I may have exercised and be happy with what I see.
While I did have a point where I did think fitness challenges are the worst, what I have realized it is not so much the challenge but the mindset that you have going into it. It is all about making sure that you aim for goals that are healthy for you while making sure you are happy with the direction you are going in. Last but not least I want to acknowledge the fitness communities that such challenges form, the ones that keep people going and motivated towards their goals.
What are some of the viral fitness challenges that have caught your attention in the past? Share some of the steps you've taken to accept that when it comes to body type, it's not one-size-fits-all in the comments below. You're doing great!