This is just wrong.

Hey ladies! I was just hanging out on twitter and found this totally rad, totally logical, practical, and FITSPORATIONAL post! Looks like it’s time for a lifestyle change for this girl!

if you didn’t get the sarcasm, then you probably haven’t been reading my blog for long.

Seriously, fitspo, you are getting a little ridiculous.
Aimed at teens who want to be skinny, or fit, or whatever… This little gem takes generally decent principals (eat clean, strength train on top of your cardio), and perverts them into an anorexic’s wet dream. I know for a fact, because when I was dealing with it in my youth, I would’ve snapped this up and made it my mantra.

Ten years later, this makes me sad for anyone who is going through what I did. It’s a scary time for youth with eating disorders, because crap like this makes it seem normal and acceptable to do jumping jacks as a punishment for eating, to completely destroy your metabolism in favor of eating nothing bigger than your fist and doing excessive cardio. As long as you add a quest to be “fit” on top of your desire to be skinny, then apparently it is ok!

These fitness “anons” on twitter make me shudder. Their advice is always borderline pro-ana, and their audience, thanks to the wonderful World Wide Web, is girls who are at a turning point in their lives where they can be healthy and strong, or trapped in a lifestyle of food shame and excessive overtraining.

My philosophy of course always remains the same: If you want to be fit, you have to train and eat for growth.
If I lifted the weights I do 6 days a week, I would die.
If I went crazy on the cardio 7 days a week, on top of the lifting, I would die.
If I never ate anything bigger than my fist, I would probably start killing people. And then I would die.

I don’t know why no one is anonymously advocating big boring lifting programs to young girls. Or eating enough to sustain an active lifestyle. I guess it’s the fact that doing squats heavy enough to make you make those faces (any of my heavy lifting ladies know what I’m talking about) isn’t sexy.

There’s also the underlying fear of ladies who lift getting more yoked than they want to… Which we know is highly unlikely, but for some reason every girl who is new to lifting thinks they are an exception to that rule. (And we as educated fit folk silently scream every time we read a blog post about some broad who is putting on so so much muscle so so fast and needs to dial it down in their opinion. You’re not! You were just fatter before!)

In a nutshell, I’m all about doing what works for you and your body. But in all honesty, I think the only thing this grand plan will work for is further perpetuating unhealthy means to someone’s ideal “end.” We need to stop this blatant bullshit before it lands in the hands of people we care about who are too uneducated or even trapped in their own disorders to realize this is dumb.

I personally think that it’s our job to protect and educate, to take a second away from our own bad ass endeavors and awesome lifestyles to look out for the little guys (or little girls in this case).
Stop spreading this bullshit. Start drawing lines. Don’t turn a blind eye to scary unhealthy fitspo – it gives us all a bad name when we get lumped into a category with shit like this.