January 16, 2019 • 30 mins
It's a new year, and for a lot of us that means goals to get more exercise. Fitness inspiration, known as fitspo, is supposed to get women exercising, but is it helpful or hurtful for women's body images? Find out in this classic episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, this is Annie, and you're listening to stuff. I
never told you. It's a new year, and that means
I've already had not one, not too not three, but
(00:26):
four friends come up to me and tell me about
their diet and exercise plans to lose weight. I have
one friend in particular who is big into Pinterest, and
she has a board with all these pictures of fit
women penned on it, and a lot of them have
these motivational quotes, and I'm walking a fine line between
being supportive for her but also trying to make sure
(00:48):
that her goals are realistic. This whole idea of fitspiration
or fitzpo was really damaging for me when I was younger.
I didn't understand why, seemingly, no matter what I did,
I couldn't look like these women that are paid to
look that way. Why I couldn't get the body that
I so desperately wanted. It took me a long time
(01:11):
to realize that for me, fits spiration was unhealthy, and
it's not that way for everybody. But this is a
reminder to be mindful of the social media and images
you're consuming and if you notice on healthy patterns developing,
because of those images realize when you need to step away.
Please enjoy this classic episode all about the ins and
(01:33):
outs of fitzpo. Welcome to stuff Mob Never Told You
from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Kristen and I'm Caroline. And this episode
about fit Spo slash fit Spiration is something that a
(01:57):
listener from Australia suggested on Facebook, and I'm glad that
she suggested it because it's something that has been on
my mind as well. But before I go any further,
let's talk about what fits bo is for listeners that
might be unfamiliar. Caroline, Um, we got a good definition
from an Atlantic article. Actually, they talked a seventeen year
(02:19):
old page Padilla who runs a sort of I guess
you could call it a fit spiration or a thinspiration blog,
and a lot of her images have actually taken off
and sort of developed a life of their own out
on the internet. She had actually started her blog because
she wanted to lose some weight to be on the
(02:39):
rowing team, but she wanted to find a good, healthy
way to do it. She wanted to inspire herself and
she also wanted to find out what other people did
to inspire themselves why they wanted to lose weight, and
she started to get a lot of I'm I mean,
I'm cutting the short story very short. But she started
to get a lot of very negative, almost scary things.
So instead of being like, you know, I want to
be strong, I want to be an athlete, it was
(03:00):
more like I don't want my thighs to touch, you know,
really negative reinforcement instead of positive reinforcement. Yeah, it veered
into the pro interrexit, pro eating disorder thinspiration that a
lot of the media have been reporting on in the
past two years. Uh, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumbler have
(03:25):
all taken steps to block pro anna or pro eaty
thins bow from their sites. And so Padia talks about
how thinspiration sort of lad into fit spiration right, and
how she says, you know, there's thinspiration, which is now
kind of an unhealthy, sickly fascination with someone with an
(03:46):
eating disorder, she says, and then there's fit spiration, which
concentrates on the health aspect. She says. My website, I've
tagged it as thinspiration, but personally I'm a fits bow
blogger rather than a thins Bow blogger, So not to
get puny here, but there's a very thin line between
fins Bow and fits Bow and positive motivation and something
(04:08):
that's going to make you feel really bad about yourself
personally personal real talk time, When I'm on Pinterest and
I see some of these fits bow images and I'm
talking fits Bow, not fins Bow, all these pose I
I start to really feel bad about myself. I'm not kidding.
I mean, there's some stuff out there that is like, yeah,
I can be strong, and I can be healthy, and
(04:30):
I can you know, feel great about myself, and that's
all well and good. But I feel like when you
start to get into the territory of like, you know,
you've got to do it every day or you're not
good enough, he won't love you, You're not going to
be successful, You're going to be ugly. Like all of
this horrible messaging out there on the internet, I just
like can't I can't look at it because it makes
(04:52):
me just feel sick. And there is the imagery involved
as well. Just to offer some contrast between a typical
Fitsbo image versus fins Bow image, fits Bo will be
a close up on a woman's highly sculpted, usually sweat
covered six pack of abdominal muscles, indicating that she just
(05:13):
worked out and look at her muscles, and it focuses
a lot on that muscularity aspect, whereas a similar image
that's more thin spow would focus in on a girl's
flat middriff and her jutting hip bones, say sometimes on
her ribcage to It depends on the severity of the
(05:35):
fins bow, whether it's more pro anna or pro mia,
which is short for pro bolimia. But we wanted to
focus this podcast on fits bow because it says so
fitspiration has sort of scooted under the radar, whereas thinspiration
is something that has come out to you know, the
public attention is being bad. It's bad for body image,
(05:57):
is promotional of eating disorders, etcetera. And yeah, we have
fitzpo hanging out. And the more fits Bo you look
at and the more fitzbo messages you read, the more
it becomes very clear that perhaps fitzbo is not all
that healthy for us. And one of the things that
came to my mind when we started looking into Fitzbo
(06:20):
is the phrase strong is the new skinny, and you
see that on a lot of Fitsbo images, and to me,
it's kind of the foundational tenet of fitz Bo because
it's all about focusing on muscularity rather than skin and bone. Um.
And I did a little digging on it because I
wanted to know where it came from. I I assumed
(06:40):
that it was probably some kind of branding something or other,
and lo and behold it was. It was invented and
trademarked in March two thousand and ten by Fitness Brands
to LLC. And now it's become this this whole thing online. Yeah,
you really need to I mean, I'm not I'm not
(07:01):
trying to lecture here, but if if you're going to
be looking at images and quotes and stuff like this online,
you really do need to be aware of marketing because
what is good marketing. Marketing is making you want something
without you even realizing that you're being convinced to do something.
And strong as the new skinny sounds like a good thing, Yeah,
(07:23):
well yeah, it sounds like a good thing. And fits bow,
you know, kind of sounds like a good thing in
that fit you want to be fit. You want to
be fit, you want to it's coming like like Paige Padilla,
the seventeen year old blogger, said, it's coming from a
good place of let's get fit, let's get in shape,
let's get healthy. However it has kind of taken that turn. Well,
(07:47):
how about we read some of the messages. This is
image rey aside, just some messages that we found from Pinterest.
If you just look up fits Bow on Pinterest, some
of the messages that you'll find include fit is not
a destination, it's a way of life. Okay, work for it.
(08:07):
Pain is fuel. Now we're getting into dicey territory to
be able to say I used to be fat. What
you eat in private, you wear in public. God, y'all
do a little more each day than you think you
possibly can. Which isn't that's not terrible. That's kind of
something that I think about in the workplace. This though
(08:28):
it's always too early to quit. No, it's not no,
it's not um. There was one I saw that was
awful because okay, and we'll talk about how like everybody's
body shaming each other no matter what they look like.
But the quote that says, you know, skinny girls look
good with clothes on, fit girls look good naked which
(08:50):
leads me to my new personal motto of nobody can win.
You know, like it's quotes like that that are supposed
to somehow encourage you to run or lift weights or
do yoga or something, but it's it's going about it
in a really terrible way. Well, one of the fitzbo messages,
for instance, that I saw on Pinterest was be positive,
(09:12):
patient and persistent. That's great, that is totally fine. Okay, um,
but you and I, Caroline are not the only ones
who have seen some red flags, some trouble spots. Um
in fits bow. There's a blog called The Great Fitness Experiment,
and the blogger I believe your name was Charlotte called
it thin spow in a sports bra, which I really like. Yeah,
(09:35):
it's done on and Lexi Kite, who's the co founder
of Beauty Redefined, notes that there's a lot in these
images with the quotes and stuff. There's a lot of headless,
faithless women with ultra thin, surgically enhanced bodies. And so
when I when I searched for some of these images online, yeah,
they were like fit women or sculpted abs. A lot
(09:55):
of the times it was just pieces of women and
if it wasn't pieces. Yeah, and there was a woman
with obviously like surgically enhanced breasts, but with a teeny
tiny sculpted waists. So like, what kind of fifty million
different awful messages are you? Are you sending well? And
also when we talk about the headless, faceless woman, that's
something that comes up a lot when we think about
(10:18):
female objectification in advertising, etcetera. And we're now using the
same kind of objectification to sculpt our own bodies. That
is troublesome. Uh. Cynthia Bullick, who's PhD and director of
the University of North Carolina Eating Disorders Program and author
(10:38):
of The Woman in the Mirror How to Stop confusing
what you look like with who you are, told Glamour
Magazine the yes fits bo is bad for you because
it's a bunch of quote thin, overly sexualized women with
unachievable bodies. And also, she points out, and this is
this is a really great point that the messages of
fits bo are often under worded in shame if you
(11:01):
aren't exercising well. I'd also like to point out from
that Atlantic article, when they were talking to the blogger,
they asked her, like, where do you get all these
pictures of all these women from and she said she
does a Google image search for models and model portfolios.
So there's no promising that these are even real images
of a thin or fit woman. They could be airbrush
(11:23):
like and I mean we talked about air brushing before.
Like you know, she's she's pulling for inspiration, she's pulling
body types that are against the norm. And with that too. Um.
That was in response to asking how like pro anna
blogs and hyper thinspo blogs will get their images um
for that, But with fits Bow it always gets a
(11:44):
bit of a pass because it's like, well, it's promoting exercise.
It's great to exercise. You know what about problems with
you know, Americans being overweight, No beast, don't we need
to exercise, Caroline, come on? Um, Well, the thing about
it is fits Bow seems to advocate for not just
exercise for health sake, but compulsive exercise. And this ties
(12:07):
in with something called the female athlete triad, which is
a combo of compulsive exercise, abnormal eating habits, and UM
the physiological effects on the female body, which usually includes
a menorrha which is missing UM, a period or two
UM and dr Susanne Gerard at UC Berkeley highlights some
(12:31):
of the hallmarks of compulsive exercise, which sounds a lot
like the stuff that fits BO is advocating for. For instance,
people who compulsively exercise tend to exercise as a substitute
for a social life. They find time at any cost
to do it. They're preoccupied with exercise, or have intrusive
(12:53):
thoughts about it. They feel overly anxious, guilty, or angry
if they can't exercise. Yeah, And there's also the aspect
of kind of exercise as punishment for eating something that
you consider bad, and exercising purely to look better instead
of actually what fits BO says, to be fit, it's
not so much about being healthy, honestly, it's more about, like,
(13:15):
I need to look better and have the six pack abs. Yeah,
and you're never being satisfied with your physical achievements. And
it makes sense that the fits BO might set off
an endless cycle of compulsive exercising towards nothing, because if
you're using the image of someone's body that is not
(13:36):
your own, possibly airbrush, possibly a model, possibly someone who
might have gotten that thin via eating disorder, and if
that's your goal, that's something that your body might not
even ever be able to do or look like. Then
you know, it's like we're we're just setting up these
these unrealistic and unachievable and unhealthy goals for ourselves because
(13:57):
we're trying to do something to our insides to just
ultimately change our outside right, and that obsession is a
part of the drive that is, you know, driving compulsive exercising.
A study from the International Journal of Eating Disorders examined
almost fifteen twelve to fourteen year olds and found that
the strongest predictors of compulsive exercise were a drive for thinness, perfectionism,
(14:21):
and obsessive compulsiveness, which is very there's a lot of
overlap there with the drive for eating disorders, like girls,
young girls and women who have eating disorders often also
have that type a perfectionism obsessive compulsiveness. And even though
compulsive exercise might seem like a healthy alternative to just
never eating, not necessarily because it roots back to a
(14:43):
lot of the same issues, like body dissatisfaction. There was
a paper we found in the International Journal of Eating
Disorders which examined a hundred and ten patients who had
been admitted to a University Eating Disorders program, and it
found that thirty one percent of those qualified as compulsive exercisers,
and that the compulsive exercise was significantly more related to
(15:08):
body dissatisfaction than other things that were going on alongside
the eating disorders. And they also found that the trend
for compulsive exercise was higher among anorexia patients than bulimia patients.
And for another overlap between the pro and a pro
e D online community and fits bo that I found,
(15:29):
which I thought was glaring, there was a paper on
anorexia and the Internet, I believe it came out in
two thousand eleven, and it was talking about how pro
ana sites quote often use a tone of empowerment in
a voice of elite superiority, suggesting that participants in site
members are a unique group of highly disciplined achievers who
have accomplished a great goal by becoming anorexic. And that
(15:53):
kind of empowerment and superiority is so similar to the
tone of those extreme fits BO messages, because you're achieving
your power through the musculature of your body and allowing
exercise to completely overtake your life. The whole thing about
(16:14):
pain being fuel, how it's always too early to quit.
How fit is not a destination, it's a way of life,
like all all of that stuff. It's it's very similar
messaging and it's insidious. I mean, it affects us, whether
we realize it or not, which is why I can't
even look at that stuff because I like sandwiches and
(16:35):
I am not in the best shape and I just
don't want to feel bad about myself on a daily basis.
But Melissa Fabella over at Misrepresentation talks about how you know,
whether we are prone to eating disorders or not, these
images do affect us. She cited a statistic that for
people without eating disorders this is without eating disorders who
(16:57):
viewed pro ana sites were prompted to reduce their caloric
intake the following week by two thousand, four hundred and
seventy calories. Yeah, so it's like it gets into our heads,
whether we really wanted to or not, and it's not.
She also makes a point of saying that you know,
it's not these images that necessarily create all of these
(17:22):
eating disorders, that proneness towards anxiety, obsession, perfectionism, all of
those things are usually in place in someone and then
it leads into the unhealthy behaviors with whether it's eating,
compulsive exercise, whatever it might be. But the fact that
it's so accessible to girls and guys, it's not just
(17:46):
girls who are affected by it, it's also guys um
is a big problem. And I think it's it's unfortunate
that fitsbo has largely been left out of this conversation
because the major social media networks are taking such broad
measures to weed this stuff out, even though Twitter is
(18:08):
massively behind on it. But it's only for fins Bow,
pro Anna body harm, etcetera. Right, because yeah, we just
still haven't hit that same kind of point with fits Bow. Yeah,
I guess as far as as far as media coverage,
you know, media attention goes. And let's talk about the
(18:38):
whole thigh gap thing for just a second, because this
is something that has come up in the past month
or so as being this trend among thince Bow the
girls are really into which your images of very thin
women's legs whose thighs don't touch and I've seen fitz
(18:58):
Bow images of that of a girl with a thigh
gap um in you know, very short stretchy shorts and
a sports bra. How is that any different though than
her not being sweaty and just in panties. Instead, it's
the literal representation of fits bo is thin and a
sports brawl exactly, literal actual representation exactly. And again there's
(19:23):
absolutely nothing wrong with anyone wanting to become healthier and
get fit and exercise and needing some inspiration to get
off the couch and do that. But it's just I
don't know about you, Caroline, but just in doing a
basic search on Pinterest for fits Bow, I would say
that of it struck me as thins bow and not
(19:49):
healthy fits Bow. Yeah, I yes, agreed. Well, so I mean,
how do we how do we look at this stuff
and and tell ourselves to focus and to kind of
know what we're looking at. We We mentioned Lexi Kite
earlier who's the co founder of Beauty Redefined, and and
(20:09):
she does talk about pay attention. Is it marketing? Are
these ads for Nike? Is that sweaty stomach actually selling
you running shoes? Because they are They're using these girl
power messages, these raw, raw messages so that you'll feel
good about buying their products. And Lexi says, is it
a message of real health and fitness? Or messages asking
(20:30):
you to co modify yourself to appear a certain way,
and in doing so, does it dis another body type?
Pitting female against female? What was the thing that you
mentioned about skinny looking good in clothes but fit looking
good naked? And that's just pitting one body type against another?
Are we shaming other body types, you know, just to
(20:53):
make our us feel better? Right? And then uh, you
know they mentioned I think it was Alexei who mentioned, uh,
the Marilyn Monroe I don't know who was on the
other side, but it's like, when did Marilyn Monroe type
of attractiveness become ugly and this became attractive, you know,
pointing to a skinnier woman, And it's like, let's let's
(21:13):
not let's find a different way to be happy with
who we are rather than telling somebody else they're ugly. Right,
Because while yes, we should celebrate female curves, you know,
for instance, with my body type, I am not a
curvy woman. I'm kind of straight up and down. I'm
more you know, yeah, just that I'm never gonna I'm
(21:34):
never gonna have an hour glass figure. But you know,
so so that message for me would be like, oh, well,
I guess I'm not so much of a woman right there.
There's no reason to make somebody else feel bad, and
I mean this goes back to kindergarten rules here, there's
no reason to make somebody else feel bad so that
you will feel better. And I mean those feelings are
another thing that we really have to pay attention to.
(21:55):
Are these fitsbo images inspiring you? Are they? Are they good?
Are they motivating you to get off the couch and
go do something? Or they're just making you feel ashamed
like they tend to do to me. Because if they're
motivating you, that's great. But if they're just making you
worried about how you're being looked at, then that is terrible.
(22:16):
And Virginia saul Smith, a writer, says that pictures of
bikini clad chiseled muscles beaded with sweat, that's about pretty
not about health. Yeah, it's a whole health versus obsession
thing too. It's healthy to go running, It is obsessive
to exercise, you know, for four hours every day. Yeah,
(22:36):
Like even when you're hurt or even when you're really sick,
Like sometimes your body is telling you it needs a break,
and sometimes you need to listen yeah, And I mean
we can just kind of apply the everything in moderation
maxim to that. You know that moderation is healthy, the
obsessive extreme is not healthy. So yeah, clearly fits boke
(22:59):
at us pretty riled. Yeah, I just, um, I want
to like be everybody's very godmother and somehow way of
a magic wand over you and say that you're beautiful.
And I think that you should try to be very
careful about what you use as your inspiration to get
healthier or or get more in shape, because I mean,
(23:22):
exercise can be a great thing, and eating right is
a great thing. But when you take these things two
extremes because you're so worried about being looked at, I
I think you need to check yourself before you wreck
yourself and really, you know, take care of yourself. Yeah,
and again it's not it's not that we're blaming these
(23:43):
images on eating disorders or compulsive exercise or you know,
problems that have have many different layers and many different facets.
But it is part of the problem. There are symptoms
of greater problems, and it's the accessibility factor and the
fact that it's targeting not just it's not just younger girls.
(24:03):
These are for women of all ages to critique ourselves
again and again, and researching for this episode reminded me
of that. I remember it so clearly the very first
time I saw an image of another girl who was
thinner than I was, and it made me feel bad
about my body. And it was in a Delia's catalog
(24:26):
in the swimsuit section, and she had a thigh gap,
and I, you know, I was probably like eleven or
twelve years old, and it was the first time it
hit me like a ton of bricks, saying I don't
look like that. Yeah. Well, the thing about the thigh
gap in particular also is that we have to remember that,
like you look a certain way, I look a certain way,
and that Delia's model looks a certain way. I just
(24:47):
was not born with the capability of my thighs being
apart exactly. And that's and that's the thing. It's all
about media literacy and understanding that, you know, different bodies
are simply made differently, Yeah, differ different people have naturally
thin bodies, or their legs are shaped in such a
way that you know, they may have that thigh gap.
(25:09):
But I don't think that you should go defining yourself
by a lack of something. Yeah, let's promote what we
do have, Like, you know, very very nice necks and
and eyes are eyes you can look into. People love
our eyebrows. People do love our lives, and our eyebrows
(25:32):
love you. Well. Okay, I could obviously like go on
and on and on about thins or fits both then
spo every kind of spow. Yes, um, but I hope
that that this was um informative for listeners. And again
I know we didn't touch on the guy aspect at all,
but very quickly um fits Bo was cited in a
(25:55):
New York Times article recently as um perhaps one thing
ueling hyper muscularity among boys. So this body image thing
is not just limited to women and girls. It's spreading
more and more to men as well, and we need
to get savvy about it, and you know, take pains
(26:18):
to really think about what's inspiring us to try to
change our bodies. Yeah, I mean, everybody's everybody's fighting their
own battle and we need to wage it with love.
With love, we'll start a pinterest of love spiration, but
just images of love. Yeah, So send us your thoughts
(26:40):
on all the stuff. It's uh it's kind of a
big topic, but an important one. Mom Stuff at Discovery
dot com. You can also hit us up on Facebook
or tweet us at Mom's Stuff podcasts. And before we
get to a couple of those messages you sent us,
let's take a quick break and we'll be right back
with some letters. And now back to our letters. I
(27:11):
got one here from James and it's in response to
our episode from a while ago on c sections. But
he had some Caesar related trivia for us, Caroline, and
I know you love Caesar related trivia. Um, and this
is in reference to us talking about the etymology of
C section. Why we call it a Ceserian section? To
begin with, he said, Pliny the Elder, the one who
(27:34):
died from the eruption of Mount Vesuvia's, composed a short
encyclopedia called the natural History, which we have cited before
on the podcast. There are all sorts of topics, including monkeys, aphrodisiacs,
and circumstances and conditions surrounding births, to name a few.
He actually goes the other way, sort of and explaining
the etymology of Cesian section. You see the Latin verb
(27:58):
side array means you cut, so He tells us that
the first member of the Caesar family, way back in
the distant past, got his name from his mother's uterus,
having been cut a sizo matrix utero in Latin. So
in his mind, it's not that we call them Cesareans
because that's how Caesar was born, but that the Caesar
(28:18):
family got its name from its eponymous member being cut
from its mother. Sorry, if that was redundant for an
English analog, it might be like having the family name torn.
Very interested. I appreciate etymology tidbits like that and family history.
You're talking to some nerds right here. Okay, So here's
(28:42):
an email from Erica about going to the guy NO
and she has a very good tip that I think
I might use next time. Ago, she says, even though
I'm in my thirties, I still get a little nervous
before a GUYO appointment, even though I know it's coming,
just because it can be so awkward and uncomfortable. But
I have the greatest tip that I learned that I
thought you might want to share with your listeners. It
(29:04):
has totally helped me not dread this appointment. I learned
this tip from a specialist, as I have vole videnia.
This condition means that if not handled properly, a visit
to the guynacologist could be quite painful to the outside
of the vagina. He told me to always ask the
guyn of college is to use a small speculum or
what they use on teens who knew there was more
(29:25):
than one size. I have had several different guinnas over
the years and they all respect my requests and it
has never been a problem. It is much less painful
and I walk out of the office feeling like I
did something good for my health instead of feeling like
violated like I did in the past. Hope that can
help someone, Eric. I think you just help to people,
and hopefully you'll help some more. So thank you very
(29:46):
much for that tip, and thanks to everyone who has
written in to mom Stuff at Discovery dot com, which
is our email address. You can also message us on
Facebook that's probably the fastest way to get a response
from us in fact, or you can tweet us at
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And finally, don't forget to watch and subscribe to us
(30:10):
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com
Hey, this is Annie, and you're listening to stuff. I
never told you. It's a new year, and that means
I've already had not one, not too not three, but
(00:26):
four friends come up to me and tell me about
their diet and exercise plans to lose weight. I have
one friend in particular who is big into Pinterest, and
she has a board with all these pictures of fit
women penned on it, and a lot of them have
these motivational quotes, and I'm walking a fine line between
being supportive for her but also trying to make sure
(00:48):
that her goals are realistic. This whole idea of fitspiration
or fitzpo was really damaging for me when I was younger.
I didn't understand why, seemingly, no matter what I did,
I couldn't look like these women that are paid to
look that way. Why I couldn't get the body that
I so desperately wanted. It took me a long time
(01:11):
to realize that for me, fits spiration was unhealthy, and
it's not that way for everybody. But this is a
reminder to be mindful of the social media and images
you're consuming and if you notice on healthy patterns developing,
because of those images realize when you need to step away.
Please enjoy this classic episode all about the ins and
(01:33):
outs of fitzpo. Welcome to stuff Mob Never Told You
from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Kristen and I'm Caroline. And this episode
about fit Spo slash fit Spiration is something that a
(01:57):
listener from Australia suggested on Facebook, and I'm glad that
she suggested it because it's something that has been on
my mind as well. But before I go any further,
let's talk about what fits bo is for listeners that
might be unfamiliar. Caroline, Um, we got a good definition
from an Atlantic article. Actually, they talked a seventeen year
(02:19):
old page Padilla who runs a sort of I guess
you could call it a fit spiration or a thinspiration blog,
and a lot of her images have actually taken off
and sort of developed a life of their own out
on the internet. She had actually started her blog because
she wanted to lose some weight to be on the
(02:39):
rowing team, but she wanted to find a good, healthy
way to do it. She wanted to inspire herself and
she also wanted to find out what other people did
to inspire themselves why they wanted to lose weight, and
she started to get a lot of I'm I mean,
I'm cutting the short story very short. But she started
to get a lot of very negative, almost scary things.
So instead of being like, you know, I want to
be strong, I want to be an athlete, it was
(03:00):
more like I don't want my thighs to touch, you know,
really negative reinforcement instead of positive reinforcement. Yeah, it veered
into the pro interrexit, pro eating disorder thinspiration that a
lot of the media have been reporting on in the
past two years. Uh, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumbler have
(03:25):
all taken steps to block pro anna or pro eaty
thins bow from their sites. And so Padia talks about
how thinspiration sort of lad into fit spiration right, and
how she says, you know, there's thinspiration, which is now
kind of an unhealthy, sickly fascination with someone with an
(03:46):
eating disorder, she says, and then there's fit spiration, which
concentrates on the health aspect. She says. My website, I've
tagged it as thinspiration, but personally I'm a fits bow
blogger rather than a thins Bow blogger, So not to
get puny here, but there's a very thin line between
fins Bow and fits Bow and positive motivation and something
(04:08):
that's going to make you feel really bad about yourself
personally personal real talk time, When I'm on Pinterest and
I see some of these fits bow images and I'm
talking fits Bow, not fins Bow, all these pose I
I start to really feel bad about myself. I'm not kidding.
I mean, there's some stuff out there that is like, yeah,
I can be strong, and I can be healthy, and
(04:30):
I can you know, feel great about myself, and that's
all well and good. But I feel like when you
start to get into the territory of like, you know,
you've got to do it every day or you're not
good enough, he won't love you, You're not going to
be successful, You're going to be ugly. Like all of
this horrible messaging out there on the internet, I just
like can't I can't look at it because it makes
(04:52):
me just feel sick. And there is the imagery involved
as well. Just to offer some contrast between a typical
Fitsbo image versus fins Bow image, fits Bo will be
a close up on a woman's highly sculpted, usually sweat
covered six pack of abdominal muscles, indicating that she just
(05:13):
worked out and look at her muscles, and it focuses
a lot on that muscularity aspect, whereas a similar image
that's more thin spow would focus in on a girl's
flat middriff and her jutting hip bones, say sometimes on
her ribcage to It depends on the severity of the
(05:35):
fins bow, whether it's more pro anna or pro mia,
which is short for pro bolimia. But we wanted to
focus this podcast on fits bow because it says so
fitspiration has sort of scooted under the radar, whereas thinspiration
is something that has come out to you know, the
public attention is being bad. It's bad for body image,
(05:57):
is promotional of eating disorders, etcetera. And yeah, we have
fitzpo hanging out. And the more fits Bo you look
at and the more fitzbo messages you read, the more
it becomes very clear that perhaps fitzbo is not all
that healthy for us. And one of the things that
came to my mind when we started looking into Fitzbo
(06:20):
is the phrase strong is the new skinny, and you
see that on a lot of Fitsbo images, and to me,
it's kind of the foundational tenet of fitz Bo because
it's all about focusing on muscularity rather than skin and bone. Um.
And I did a little digging on it because I
wanted to know where it came from. I I assumed
(06:40):
that it was probably some kind of branding something or other,
and lo and behold it was. It was invented and
trademarked in March two thousand and ten by Fitness Brands
to LLC. And now it's become this this whole thing online. Yeah,
you really need to I mean, I'm not I'm not
(07:01):
trying to lecture here, but if if you're going to
be looking at images and quotes and stuff like this online,
you really do need to be aware of marketing because
what is good marketing. Marketing is making you want something
without you even realizing that you're being convinced to do something.
And strong as the new skinny sounds like a good thing, Yeah,
(07:23):
well yeah, it sounds like a good thing. And fits bow,
you know, kind of sounds like a good thing in
that fit you want to be fit. You want to
be fit, you want to it's coming like like Paige Padilla,
the seventeen year old blogger, said, it's coming from a
good place of let's get fit, let's get in shape,
let's get healthy. However it has kind of taken that turn. Well,
(07:47):
how about we read some of the messages. This is
image rey aside, just some messages that we found from Pinterest.
If you just look up fits Bow on Pinterest, some
of the messages that you'll find include fit is not
a destination, it's a way of life. Okay, work for it.
(08:07):
Pain is fuel. Now we're getting into dicey territory to
be able to say I used to be fat. What
you eat in private, you wear in public. God, y'all
do a little more each day than you think you
possibly can. Which isn't that's not terrible. That's kind of
something that I think about in the workplace. This though
(08:28):
it's always too early to quit. No, it's not no,
it's not um. There was one I saw that was
awful because okay, and we'll talk about how like everybody's
body shaming each other no matter what they look like.
But the quote that says, you know, skinny girls look
good with clothes on, fit girls look good naked which
(08:50):
leads me to my new personal motto of nobody can win.
You know, like it's quotes like that that are supposed
to somehow encourage you to run or lift weights or
do yoga or something, but it's it's going about it
in a really terrible way. Well, one of the fitzbo messages,
for instance, that I saw on Pinterest was be positive,
(09:12):
patient and persistent. That's great, that is totally fine. Okay, um,
but you and I, Caroline are not the only ones
who have seen some red flags, some trouble spots. Um
in fits bow. There's a blog called The Great Fitness Experiment,
and the blogger I believe your name was Charlotte called
it thin spow in a sports bra, which I really like. Yeah,
(09:35):
it's done on and Lexi Kite, who's the co founder
of Beauty Redefined, notes that there's a lot in these
images with the quotes and stuff. There's a lot of headless,
faithless women with ultra thin, surgically enhanced bodies. And so
when I when I searched for some of these images online, yeah,
they were like fit women or sculpted abs. A lot
(09:55):
of the times it was just pieces of women and
if it wasn't pieces. Yeah, and there was a woman
with obviously like surgically enhanced breasts, but with a teeny
tiny sculpted waists. So like, what kind of fifty million
different awful messages are you? Are you sending well? And
also when we talk about the headless, faceless woman, that's
something that comes up a lot when we think about
(10:18):
female objectification in advertising, etcetera. And we're now using the
same kind of objectification to sculpt our own bodies. That
is troublesome. Uh. Cynthia Bullick, who's PhD and director of
the University of North Carolina Eating Disorders Program and author
(10:38):
of The Woman in the Mirror How to Stop confusing
what you look like with who you are, told Glamour
Magazine the yes fits bo is bad for you because
it's a bunch of quote thin, overly sexualized women with
unachievable bodies. And also, she points out, and this is
this is a really great point that the messages of
fits bo are often under worded in shame if you
(11:01):
aren't exercising well. I'd also like to point out from
that Atlantic article, when they were talking to the blogger,
they asked her, like, where do you get all these
pictures of all these women from and she said she
does a Google image search for models and model portfolios.
So there's no promising that these are even real images
of a thin or fit woman. They could be airbrush
(11:23):
like and I mean we talked about air brushing before.
Like you know, she's she's pulling for inspiration, she's pulling
body types that are against the norm. And with that too. Um.
That was in response to asking how like pro anna
blogs and hyper thinspo blogs will get their images um
for that, But with fits Bow it always gets a
(11:44):
bit of a pass because it's like, well, it's promoting exercise.
It's great to exercise. You know what about problems with
you know, Americans being overweight, No beast, don't we need
to exercise, Caroline, come on? Um, Well, the thing about
it is fits Bow seems to advocate for not just
exercise for health sake, but compulsive exercise. And this ties
(12:07):
in with something called the female athlete triad, which is
a combo of compulsive exercise, abnormal eating habits, and UM
the physiological effects on the female body, which usually includes
a menorrha which is missing UM, a period or two
UM and dr Susanne Gerard at UC Berkeley highlights some
(12:31):
of the hallmarks of compulsive exercise, which sounds a lot
like the stuff that fits BO is advocating for. For instance,
people who compulsively exercise tend to exercise as a substitute
for a social life. They find time at any cost
to do it. They're preoccupied with exercise, or have intrusive
(12:53):
thoughts about it. They feel overly anxious, guilty, or angry
if they can't exercise. Yeah, And there's also the aspect
of kind of exercise as punishment for eating something that
you consider bad, and exercising purely to look better instead
of actually what fits BO says, to be fit, it's
not so much about being healthy, honestly, it's more about, like,
(13:15):
I need to look better and have the six pack abs. Yeah,
and you're never being satisfied with your physical achievements. And
it makes sense that the fits BO might set off
an endless cycle of compulsive exercising towards nothing, because if
you're using the image of someone's body that is not
(13:36):
your own, possibly airbrush, possibly a model, possibly someone who
might have gotten that thin via eating disorder, and if
that's your goal, that's something that your body might not
even ever be able to do or look like. Then
you know, it's like we're we're just setting up these
these unrealistic and unachievable and unhealthy goals for ourselves because
(13:57):
we're trying to do something to our insides to just
ultimately change our outside right, and that obsession is a
part of the drive that is, you know, driving compulsive exercising.
A study from the International Journal of Eating Disorders examined
almost fifteen twelve to fourteen year olds and found that
the strongest predictors of compulsive exercise were a drive for thinness, perfectionism,
(14:21):
and obsessive compulsiveness, which is very there's a lot of
overlap there with the drive for eating disorders, like girls,
young girls and women who have eating disorders often also
have that type a perfectionism obsessive compulsiveness. And even though
compulsive exercise might seem like a healthy alternative to just
never eating, not necessarily because it roots back to a
(14:43):
lot of the same issues, like body dissatisfaction. There was
a paper we found in the International Journal of Eating
Disorders which examined a hundred and ten patients who had
been admitted to a University Eating Disorders program, and it
found that thirty one percent of those qualified as compulsive exercisers,
and that the compulsive exercise was significantly more related to
(15:08):
body dissatisfaction than other things that were going on alongside
the eating disorders. And they also found that the trend
for compulsive exercise was higher among anorexia patients than bulimia patients.
And for another overlap between the pro and a pro
e D online community and fits bo that I found,
(15:29):
which I thought was glaring, there was a paper on
anorexia and the Internet, I believe it came out in
two thousand eleven, and it was talking about how pro
ana sites quote often use a tone of empowerment in
a voice of elite superiority, suggesting that participants in site
members are a unique group of highly disciplined achievers who
have accomplished a great goal by becoming anorexic. And that
(15:53):
kind of empowerment and superiority is so similar to the
tone of those extreme fits BO messages, because you're achieving
your power through the musculature of your body and allowing
exercise to completely overtake your life. The whole thing about
(16:14):
pain being fuel, how it's always too early to quit.
How fit is not a destination, it's a way of life,
like all all of that stuff. It's it's very similar
messaging and it's insidious. I mean, it affects us, whether
we realize it or not, which is why I can't
even look at that stuff because I like sandwiches and
(16:35):
I am not in the best shape and I just
don't want to feel bad about myself on a daily basis.
But Melissa Fabella over at Misrepresentation talks about how you know,
whether we are prone to eating disorders or not, these
images do affect us. She cited a statistic that for
people without eating disorders this is without eating disorders who
(16:57):
viewed pro ana sites were prompted to reduce their caloric
intake the following week by two thousand, four hundred and
seventy calories. Yeah, so it's like it gets into our heads,
whether we really wanted to or not, and it's not.
She also makes a point of saying that you know,
it's not these images that necessarily create all of these
(17:22):
eating disorders, that proneness towards anxiety, obsession, perfectionism, all of
those things are usually in place in someone and then
it leads into the unhealthy behaviors with whether it's eating,
compulsive exercise, whatever it might be. But the fact that
it's so accessible to girls and guys, it's not just
(17:46):
girls who are affected by it, it's also guys um
is a big problem. And I think it's it's unfortunate
that fitsbo has largely been left out of this conversation
because the major social media networks are taking such broad
measures to weed this stuff out, even though Twitter is
(18:08):
massively behind on it. But it's only for fins Bow,
pro Anna body harm, etcetera. Right, because yeah, we just
still haven't hit that same kind of point with fits Bow. Yeah,
I guess as far as as far as media coverage,
you know, media attention goes. And let's talk about the
(18:38):
whole thigh gap thing for just a second, because this
is something that has come up in the past month
or so as being this trend among thince Bow the
girls are really into which your images of very thin
women's legs whose thighs don't touch and I've seen fitz
(18:58):
Bow images of that of a girl with a thigh
gap um in you know, very short stretchy shorts and
a sports bra. How is that any different though than
her not being sweaty and just in panties. Instead, it's
the literal representation of fits bo is thin and a
sports brawl exactly, literal actual representation exactly. And again there's
(19:23):
absolutely nothing wrong with anyone wanting to become healthier and
get fit and exercise and needing some inspiration to get
off the couch and do that. But it's just I
don't know about you, Caroline, but just in doing a
basic search on Pinterest for fits Bow, I would say
that of it struck me as thins bow and not
(19:49):
healthy fits Bow. Yeah, I yes, agreed. Well, so I mean,
how do we how do we look at this stuff
and and tell ourselves to focus and to kind of
know what we're looking at. We We mentioned Lexi Kite
earlier who's the co founder of Beauty Redefined, and and
(20:09):
she does talk about pay attention. Is it marketing? Are
these ads for Nike? Is that sweaty stomach actually selling
you running shoes? Because they are They're using these girl
power messages, these raw, raw messages so that you'll feel
good about buying their products. And Lexi says, is it
a message of real health and fitness? Or messages asking
(20:30):
you to co modify yourself to appear a certain way,
and in doing so, does it dis another body type?
Pitting female against female? What was the thing that you
mentioned about skinny looking good in clothes but fit looking
good naked? And that's just pitting one body type against another?
Are we shaming other body types, you know, just to
(20:53):
make our us feel better? Right? And then uh, you
know they mentioned I think it was Alexei who mentioned, uh,
the Marilyn Monroe I don't know who was on the
other side, but it's like, when did Marilyn Monroe type
of attractiveness become ugly and this became attractive, you know,
pointing to a skinnier woman, And it's like, let's let's
(21:13):
not let's find a different way to be happy with
who we are rather than telling somebody else they're ugly. Right,
Because while yes, we should celebrate female curves, you know,
for instance, with my body type, I am not a
curvy woman. I'm kind of straight up and down. I'm
more you know, yeah, just that I'm never gonna I'm
(21:34):
never gonna have an hour glass figure. But you know,
so so that message for me would be like, oh, well,
I guess I'm not so much of a woman right there.
There's no reason to make somebody else feel bad, and
I mean this goes back to kindergarten rules here, there's
no reason to make somebody else feel bad so that
you will feel better. And I mean those feelings are
another thing that we really have to pay attention to.
(21:55):
Are these fitsbo images inspiring you? Are they? Are they good?
Are they motivating you to get off the couch and
go do something? Or they're just making you feel ashamed
like they tend to do to me. Because if they're
motivating you, that's great. But if they're just making you
worried about how you're being looked at, then that is terrible.
(22:16):
And Virginia saul Smith, a writer, says that pictures of
bikini clad chiseled muscles beaded with sweat, that's about pretty
not about health. Yeah, it's a whole health versus obsession
thing too. It's healthy to go running, It is obsessive
to exercise, you know, for four hours every day. Yeah,
(22:36):
Like even when you're hurt or even when you're really sick,
Like sometimes your body is telling you it needs a break,
and sometimes you need to listen yeah, And I mean
we can just kind of apply the everything in moderation
maxim to that. You know that moderation is healthy, the
obsessive extreme is not healthy. So yeah, clearly fits boke
(22:59):
at us pretty riled. Yeah, I just, um, I want
to like be everybody's very godmother and somehow way of
a magic wand over you and say that you're beautiful.
And I think that you should try to be very
careful about what you use as your inspiration to get
healthier or or get more in shape, because I mean,
(23:22):
exercise can be a great thing, and eating right is
a great thing. But when you take these things two
extremes because you're so worried about being looked at, I
I think you need to check yourself before you wreck
yourself and really, you know, take care of yourself. Yeah,
and again it's not it's not that we're blaming these
(23:43):
images on eating disorders or compulsive exercise or you know,
problems that have have many different layers and many different facets.
But it is part of the problem. There are symptoms
of greater problems, and it's the accessibility factor and the
fact that it's targeting not just it's not just younger girls.
(24:03):
These are for women of all ages to critique ourselves
again and again, and researching for this episode reminded me
of that. I remember it so clearly the very first
time I saw an image of another girl who was
thinner than I was, and it made me feel bad
about my body. And it was in a Delia's catalog
(24:26):
in the swimsuit section, and she had a thigh gap,
and I, you know, I was probably like eleven or
twelve years old, and it was the first time it
hit me like a ton of bricks, saying I don't
look like that. Yeah. Well, the thing about the thigh
gap in particular also is that we have to remember that,
like you look a certain way, I look a certain way,
and that Delia's model looks a certain way. I just
(24:47):
was not born with the capability of my thighs being
apart exactly. And that's and that's the thing. It's all
about media literacy and understanding that, you know, different bodies
are simply made differently, Yeah, differ different people have naturally
thin bodies, or their legs are shaped in such a
way that you know, they may have that thigh gap.
(25:09):
But I don't think that you should go defining yourself
by a lack of something. Yeah, let's promote what we
do have, Like, you know, very very nice necks and
and eyes are eyes you can look into. People love
our eyebrows. People do love our lives, and our eyebrows
(25:32):
love you. Well. Okay, I could obviously like go on
and on and on about thins or fits both then
spo every kind of spow. Yes, um, but I hope
that that this was um informative for listeners. And again
I know we didn't touch on the guy aspect at all,
but very quickly um fits Bo was cited in a
(25:55):
New York Times article recently as um perhaps one thing
ueling hyper muscularity among boys. So this body image thing
is not just limited to women and girls. It's spreading
more and more to men as well, and we need
to get savvy about it, and you know, take pains
(26:18):
to really think about what's inspiring us to try to
change our bodies. Yeah, I mean, everybody's everybody's fighting their
own battle and we need to wage it with love.
With love, we'll start a pinterest of love spiration, but
just images of love. Yeah, So send us your thoughts
(26:40):
on all the stuff. It's uh it's kind of a
big topic, but an important one. Mom Stuff at Discovery
dot com. You can also hit us up on Facebook
or tweet us at Mom's Stuff podcasts. And before we
get to a couple of those messages you sent us,
let's take a quick break and we'll be right back
with some letters. And now back to our letters. I
(27:11):
got one here from James and it's in response to
our episode from a while ago on c sections. But
he had some Caesar related trivia for us, Caroline, and
I know you love Caesar related trivia. Um, and this
is in reference to us talking about the etymology of
C section. Why we call it a Ceserian section? To
begin with, he said, Pliny the Elder, the one who
(27:34):
died from the eruption of Mount Vesuvia's, composed a short
encyclopedia called the natural History, which we have cited before
on the podcast. There are all sorts of topics, including monkeys, aphrodisiacs,
and circumstances and conditions surrounding births, to name a few.
He actually goes the other way, sort of and explaining
the etymology of Cesian section. You see the Latin verb
(27:58):
side array means you cut, so He tells us that
the first member of the Caesar family, way back in
the distant past, got his name from his mother's uterus,
having been cut a sizo matrix utero in Latin. So
in his mind, it's not that we call them Cesareans
because that's how Caesar was born, but that the Caesar
(28:18):
family got its name from its eponymous member being cut
from its mother. Sorry, if that was redundant for an
English analog, it might be like having the family name torn.
Very interested. I appreciate etymology tidbits like that and family history.
You're talking to some nerds right here. Okay, So here's
(28:42):
an email from Erica about going to the guy NO
and she has a very good tip that I think
I might use next time. Ago, she says, even though
I'm in my thirties, I still get a little nervous
before a GUYO appointment, even though I know it's coming,
just because it can be so awkward and uncomfortable. But
I have the greatest tip that I learned that I
thought you might want to share with your listeners. It
(29:04):
has totally helped me not dread this appointment. I learned
this tip from a specialist, as I have vole videnia.
This condition means that if not handled properly, a visit
to the guynacologist could be quite painful to the outside
of the vagina. He told me to always ask the
guyn of college is to use a small speculum or
what they use on teens who knew there was more
(29:25):
than one size. I have had several different guinnas over
the years and they all respect my requests and it
has never been a problem. It is much less painful
and I walk out of the office feeling like I
did something good for my health instead of feeling like
violated like I did in the past. Hope that can
help someone, Eric. I think you just help to people,
and hopefully you'll help some more. So thank you very
(29:46):
much for that tip, and thanks to everyone who has
written in to mom Stuff at Discovery dot com, which
is our email address. You can also message us on
Facebook that's probably the fastest way to get a response
from us in fact, or you can tweet us at
mom Stuff Podcasts. You can also follow us on Tumbler
where it's stuff Mom Never Told You dot tumblr dot com.
And finally, don't forget to watch and subscribe to us
(30:10):
on the YouTube. We come out with three brand new
videos every week Monday, Wednesday, Friday, so don't miss it
because it's great and it's at YouTube dot com. Slash
stuff Mom never told you. We're more on this and
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