117: The Real Cost of Fitness in America (w/Natalia Petrzela)
Fitness is the beating heart of America. No, wait, that’s opportunistic capitalism. But opportunistic capitalism, as it turns out, is the beating heart of fitness. Yet fitness has a soul too—in fact, mysticism, capitalism, and fitness have been dancing together for a very long time, while politics calls the tune, as historian and assistant professor at The New School, Natalia Petrzela, is here to tell us about today. We should also note that Natalia is our only four-time guest.She’s also the author of an incredible new book, to be published this December by the University of Chicago Press, titled Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession. The book spans over a hundred years, chronicling shifting cultural attitudes, gendered expectations, political inflections, and jackpot innovations in how Americans have celebrated, reviled, bought, sold, and been turned-on or enlightened by rituals of exercise.Like us, Natalia loves physical culture, but contradictions abound in the collisions between embodiment, politics, and commerce. If, as the marketing has told us over the years, recreational running is better for the mind than psychotherapy, moonlit naked hottubing at Esalen can save the world, women can simultaneously embrace dance studio fitness as a path of feminist liberation and a way to titilate the male gaze, and yoga can promise freedom from ever needing drugs or surgery, is it any wonder that a country so obsessed with exercise is so notoriously unhealthy?Show NotesFit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise ObsessionFrom Performance to Participation: The Origins of the Fit NationWorking On The Work of Working Out: A history of fitness in America
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Conspirituality 117, The Real Cost of Fitness in America with Natalia Petruzzella.
Fitness is the beating heart of America.
No, wait, that's opportunistic capitalism.
But opportunistic capitalism, as it turns out, is the beating heart of fitness.
Yet, fitness has a soul, too.
In fact, mysticism, capitalism, and fitness have been dancing together for a very long time, while politics calls the tune, as historian and assistant professor at the New School, Natalia Petrozzella, is here to tell us about today.
She's also the author of an incredible new book to be published this December by the University of Chicago Press, titled Fit Nation, the Gains and Pains of America's Exercise Obsession.
The book spans over 100 years, chronicling shifting cultural attitudes, gendered expectations, political inflections, and jackpot innovations in how Americans have celebrated, reviled, bought, sold, and been turned on or enlightened by rituals of exercise.
Now, like us, Natalia loves physical culture, but contradictions abound in the collisions between embodiment, politics, and commerce.
If, as the marketing has told us over the years, recreational running is better for the mind than psychotherapy, Moonlit naked hot tubbing at Esalen can really save the world.
Women can simultaneously embrace dance studio fitness as a path of feminist liberation and a way to titillate the male gaze.
And yoga can promise freedom from ever needing drugs or surgery.
Is it then any wonder that a country so obsessed with exercise is so notoriously unhealthy?
Okay, Natalia, I'm thinking of a moment and I don't know why this is burned in memory, but it is.
It's the 19th Street Equinox.
I'm standing, you're sitting there.
You had either just finished a class, teaching or taking one.
I was just coming in.
We had known each other, but it was the first time we ever had a conversation.
And specifically, I remember that conversation because Myself coming from media and journalism, yourself coming from academia, we both talked about how we had to hide our fitness careers in certain ways because our other careers looked down upon people being fitness teachers.
And that was the first time we connected and we've been real friends ever since.
It's changed.
I mean, you know, I don't hide that anymore.
You go to your website and you see your academia right next to you on stage teaching.
So talk to me a little bit about that change and then how that helped you as an academic to lead into writing this book.
Yeah, God, so many places to begin here.
And I think that moment is really evocative for some of the themes that drew me to this project that I explored in the book.
So yeah, Derek, that must have been the early 2000s, like, you know, maybe 2010s.
And I think we were at this moment where you and I obviously both took kind of physical culture and fitness and, you know, yoga seriously as something that could do really good things for people's lives and their bodies and their minds and for ourselves.
But among the kind of thinking classes, as people would like to style themselves, my sense then was, you know, that like, people didn't think this stuff was worth talking about at all, much less taking seriously.
And so me at the time, like, I won't speak for you, but there I was trying to get tenure, like a new assistant professor, you know, kind of youngish woman.
And I was so scared that, God, if they know that I spend my free time, like, Jumping around doing jumping jacks in a sports bra and yelling affirmations, they won't take me seriously at all.
Since then, I think we're at a really different moment where actually there are lots of, you know, scholars and journalists and sort of very serious activists and folks look to thinking about wellness culture as something to take seriously as a powerful force in our culture.
I think that's great.
Now I find myself in a kind of different position where if I'm talking to academic folks who now are kind of paying attention, I find myself actually having to sort of correct the notion that this is only a force for kind of neoliberalism, neoliberal self-regulation and like, actually guys, there is some really good stuff that can go on there.
Meanwhile, my colleagues in the fitness industry who I respect in lots of ways.
I'm like, guys, like, you know, it's not just about individual will and motivation.
They're all of these structural things that kind of shape how we go about this.
So we are in this different moment.
I'm excited.
There's more ferment and discussion.
Definitely not hiding my fitness flag any longer.
And that I think is a good thing.
It's definitely a good thing.
Now, in terms of the book, we're going to go into the history.
Julian's going to start with that in a moment, but I had to really kick off this episode because looking at the landscape of the book, I think SoulCycle is so embedded in our culture now.
This idea of spirituality and fitness go together.
Back in like, I think it was a few years before 2010 when we had that discussion, our mutual friend who passed less than a year ago, Patricia Moreno, and this is how your entryway into teaching, you know, she was fusing spirituality and fitness in a way that wasn't done at that time.
Like, I don't know anything that predates that on the level that she was trying to take it.
And I don't think, if you don't really know her work, you know, she's not one of those people that's going to be seen as a mass innovator, but she really was.
So talk to me a little bit about your entry into Intensati and what that did for you.
Yeah, so I discovered Intensati, the program that Patricia Moreno, rest in power, taught as a graduate student in 2005.
And I was very fortunate.
I was getting my PhD at Stanford.
I was ABD, all but dissertation.
And so I was living in New York, kind of doing research in California and had a little bit of fellowship money to basically spend all my time writing a dissertation.
And that dissertation was about educational politics, so not connected to fitness or the body at all.
Anyway, as one does, I started procrastinating and my now husband was like, we should get a membership to this gym around the corner.
I'm like, Equinox?
That's like really bougie and expensive.
And he's like, well, I have a paying job.
Like, this is good for us.
We like to work out.
Anyway, I walked into the gym and the woman who was trying to sell me my membership said, here's a week pass, go to this woman's class, Patricia Moreno, you're going to sign up.
I looked at what she taught and I immediately gravitated towards anything but Intensati.
Intensati, this class, was described in the most woo way possible.
Spoke vocalize your intentions.
Well, you know doing a moving meditation like mantras combined like just very like woo to woo for me however this woman she taught cardio dance and power Kickboxing and all that was much more familiar.
Anyway, fast forward within a week, I was going to the affirmations class and first sort of signed on to it because, well, you know, the affirmations are really good cardio.
And so what you're doing is like punching and kicking and doing all these lunges and strength work, but you're yelling, I am strong, I am powerful.
And Patricia was this woman who would like pack 50, 70 people in a room.
It was like nothing I'd ever seen before.
Within a few days, I was not only saying the affirmations for the cardio, but I found that I was writing that dissertation.
I was like not being so sort of crabby in my, you know, life outside of the gym.
And it sounds so corny.
And I think now in 2022, we hear so many of these kind of like, You know, wellness changed my life, positive thinking, etc.
But I got to say, at the time, I shocked myself because I was this cynical, scholarly type who was cynical about the self-help industry and whatnot.
And there I was.
And so I kind of started following her around, total groupie, writing the dissertation.
And then a couple years later, she said, I am going to start training instructors.
You should do it.
And it's funny, per your initial comment, Derek, about how we met in this distinction between academia and fitness.
Literally, I was like, even though I wanted to do this, I'm like, oh, no, no, I'm getting my PhD at Stanford.
Like I'm not a fitness instructor, even though I wanted that more than anything.
She was like, just go for it.
Just try it.
I got certified, started teaching at the same club Equinox where you and I met, and I've taught in a lot of community environments ever since.
And it was really that kind of boundary breaking actually that led me to really focus on this book and on this project and saying, yeah, - Yeah, let's take fitness seriously.
It is a deeply imperfect world, but one that is really powerful in our culture.
As someone who is very allergic to woo, I will just confirm that Patricia had a way about her that made it very approachable in a way that actually made you feel good.
Natalia, this book is an absolute feast.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
It's wonderfully written.
It's easy to read.
But I have to say the depth of your analysis and the historical journey through the decades that you take us on, it gives readers something to sink their teeth into.
One thing that really stood out to me while I was reading is this persistent set of recycled tensions.
I mean, first of all, just realizing that there's nothing new under the sun.
I'll get into that in a minute.
But with regard to those tensions, here's what I'm thinking about.
You track the evolving place that fitness has in American culture from strongman Eugene Sandow's appearance at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, all the way to Michelle Obama and her Let's Move program and beyond.
I see fitness as political and entrepreneurial and even having a spiritual profile.
And my sense is that this mercurial term fitness is kind of braided together also with an emerging feminist consciousness.
But there's always a lot of complicated contradictions that you don't shy away from pointing out.
Like I have in my notes, gender stereotypes and sexual empowerment.
Political liberation and privileged self-actualization.
Female athletic expression versus the often crass exploitation that nonetheless helps normalize that female expression.
So there's lots to talk about, but let's start here.
It's 1955.
Eisenhower is president and post-World War II America is filled with Cold War anxiety.
And then someone comes along named Bonnie Pruden.
Is it Pruden or Prudin?
Pruden comes to prominence.
Why is she important for the story that you wanted to tell?
Yeah.
So Bonnie Pruden, first of all, thanks for all the kind words.
It's still in the, I'm still in a place where like relatively few people have actually read this book.
So I'm like, Oh good.
Smart people like it.
Thank you, thank you very much.
So Bonnie Pruden was this very active child-turned-dancer-turned-White Plains homemaker who looked around her community in the 1950s, a kind of bedroom suburb, and she realized that there was a big problem.
Kids, and to some extent adults too, though she was first worried about children, were inactive.
They were not as physically engaged as she and her peers had been.
And the most disturbing part to her was that one, nobody noticed this.
And two, these were supposed to be the kids who were living the American dream.
These were affluent children living in the suburbs, These were the kind of children that in the Cold War were held up as, this is what American prosperity gets you.
And what she pointed out, like first to totally deaf ears, but then with more resonance in the next few years, What she pointed out was that American prosperity was so much tied to increased leisure, whether it was having a television set, whether it was having a stroller for kids, whether it was having frozen dinners and all of these other kind of labor-saving things, that this meant kids were not moving as much.
And what did that mean?
It meant that they were becoming soft.
And that wasn't a word that she used yet, but she was very worried about this flabbiness, which she thought led to a kind of civic weakness as well.
And it was that link that allowed her to then convince first Dwight Eisenhower, the president, and then JFK, who took it to another level.
But yeah, she was really the pioneer of this.
And she both had a big career as a kind of public advocate, but then like so many fitness leaders went on to publish her own kind of private books and records and sell those to commercially.
She was on the cover of Sports Illustrated, like it's amazing people don't really know about her that much.
So she finds the pathway to charismatic influence through getting the ear of the president and also through doing some legit research, right?
Totally, totally.
So one of the things she did is she paired up with a couple of doctors, actually, and there's this very famous test called the Krauss-Weber test.
It's a little bit fetishized, as many of these tests that make headlines are, but it basically tested strength and flexibility in children, and what they realized when doing this test on several thousand American kids and comparing them with results in Europe Was that children were not only less strong in the United States, they were also less flexible.
And it was especially that focus on the rigidity of American youth that I think really hit a chord for some folks who were totally wrapped up in Cold War anxiety at the time.
Awesome.
Yeah, yeah.
So I have in my notes this list of mostly sort of political oppositions.
Fitness versus the Russians.
Fitness versus the soft American with too many modern conveniences.
Fitness versus intellect.
Fitness versus democracy.
Fitness versus heterosexuality and fitness versus femininity.
So any of those threads that you might want to pick up, but also I'm thinking of this in the context of the kind of pitched battle between the PCYF, which is the President's Council on Youth Fitness, and the NDEA, which was the National Defense Education Act.
Impressive close reading there, and I'm glad that you went to that, because that's actually what I wanted to talk about.
Some listeners may be familiar with this, some not, but basically, Bonnie Pruden's big success is that, first with Eisenhower, but then even more so with JFK, she gets these presidents to invest, if not a ton of money, a lot of energy and publicity in the idea of and the promotion of physical education and recreation in schools.
And so whereas that really hadn't been such a focus before, there are all of these promotional events with, you know, celebrated athletes and celebrities who are saying, you've got to get moving.
Fitness is for everybody.
Now, one of the things that's really interesting in this battle of the acronyms that you mentioned is that, you know, when we look back on those PE programs that the Presidential Council on Youth Fitness promoted, those are, I think rightly in a lot of ways, seen as a Cold War As I explained before, the idea is that we need to get American children fit in order to fight if the Cold War gets hot.
That is not wrong.
What I have not seen any other historian explore, and was a great surprise to me when I got into the sources, is that there's this other strand of Cold War education policy in the U.S., which actually you learn about much more in history class if you're from the U.S., which focuses around the need for science and technology education.
That's the NDEA, the National Defense Education Act of 1957.
If you ever took AP U.S.
History, that was on your test for sure.
Now, on the face of it, those don't necessarily seem like they have to be in such opposition.
But actually, at the time, all of these physical education boosters found that some of their biggest opponents were the proponents of the NDEA.
Why was that?
Because they completely believed that all this focus on the body was actually a huge distraction from the real legitimate focus on the mind.
And that really, it was totally misguided for educators to spend money and time on having kids do sit-ups and flexibility tests.
They've got to be learning calculus and robotics and all that.
And I think that that's a little bit in the weeds, but I think it's really relevant because one of the big shifts that I traced that happened over this century was the mainstreaming of the notion that body and mind are connected and that strength of body and strength of mind reinforce one another.
In the 1950s, that was so not the case.
And I think that that battle really illustrates that because there were these like mind peoples.
And there were these body people.
And the mind people were constantly saying, oh, these like meathead gym teachers, they want to turn children into like these dummies who pose on Muscle Beach.
Like that's not going to win the Cold War.
And there was really this distinction there.
So I'm glad that's the one you asked me to elaborate on, because it was a real surprise when I got into the archives.
Yeah, yeah.
And so the sense that we have to be fit to fight the Russians.
No, we have to be educated and smart and technologically innovative to fight the Russians.
No, those things maybe can go together that maybe that comes later in the story.
But then you also have this thing that's saying the Russians have these regimented, you know, enforced kind of fitness programs that you see all these kids marching around.
We don't want that's un-American.
We don't want to do that.
Right.
Yeah, so that's another aspect which is really kind of hard to square is that, you know, these people who are promoting this state investment in physical education, well, all their haters are basically looking at Europe and either looking at, you know, World War II and being like, um, hello, look at Hitler Youth.
That's what happens when you have this like physical, you know, project of the state.
Or look at these communists who have these robotic sort of collective state projects.
And they weren't wrong.
There's obviously deeply totalitarian ways that the state can police the body, and we see that in other places as well.
But I do think that that sense, even though we don't hear that come up as much anymore, I think that that was sort of why we missed the opportunity to have a robust state investment in fitness and recreation, and why basically what the rest of the book charts is how All that promise in public investment doesn't go that far.
We get a booming industry, but we have very little public investment in the bettering, allowing people to kind of better their bodies through physical fitness and the like.
Yeah.
I want to come back to something, to this idea that I said, you know, there's, I discovered there's nothing new under the sun because I had all of these like, what the fuck moments that as I was reading, I'm like, okay, this is what, this is one thread of those.
Even in the fifties, yoga is sold as improving productivity.
Even in the fifties, yoga is sold as an unrealistic weight loss method, Or they're trying to thread the needle of saying it's spiritual, but not really religious.
Even in the 50s, yoga is sold as a promising alternative to medical science.
So, you know, let's talk about Indra Devi.
And I want to, I want to quote to you from your text.
As Devi characterized in her 1953 book, Forever Young, Forever Healthy, Simplified Yoga for Modern Living, a yogi has no need.
For pills or surgery to cure ills from over or underweight to fatigue to graying hair.
Americans who tried it, she promised in the ad, would exercise mind and body to the full.
So what's her role as you see it in this story and particularly perhaps as it relates to yoga?
Yeah, so Indra Devi was just this fascinating figure, and I should say I want to shout out Michelle Goldberg, who wrote a great book about her.
And I rely on lots of scholars' work because I cover so much time that, you know, I always want to give credit where due and check out the notes of the book.
But yeah, Indra Devi was this really fascinating woman.
She was born in Latvia.
She started, she traveled all over the world.
She started a yoga studio in Southern California, like where else?
And she, I think, you know, she would teach classes in these flowing saris and spoke a lot about her travels to India and her healing from her own kind of like cardiac condition that happened through yoga.
But at the same time, at that period, she had to be so careful to market this as a secular practice.
And so she would always in the press asked to be referred to as an exercise instructor.
Like quite often, like she would do these demonstrations, which actually recall the Strongman of the World's Fair of like, you know, 60 years before, where she'd stand on her head for 30 minutes in the middle of like a shopping center.
And she had that kind of like curiosity factor.
That said, she had a studio that people were going to, like they were mostly kind of, I mean, they were like, Affluent white people for the most part.
But I think a lot of people who kind of think they know the history of yoga in the U.S.
are a little surprised by that because they think that, you know, after the Immigration Act of 1965, or maybe with Vivekananda, like early in the late 19th century, like Indian people wholesale brought yoga to the United States.
Obviously, South Asians were so important in promoting yoga in the U.S., but I actually think it was this white woman in a lot of ways who made it palatable to a culture that would have probably never gone to a session taught by someone who seemed to them foreign or exotic or, you know, That wasn't as familiar as Indra Devi successfully managed to make yoga be.
From what I remember, she was adamant about practicing because she went to Krishnamacharya and was like, you're going to teach me.
Or was it Iyengar?
And she said, you're going to teach me.
And he was like, I don't teach women.
And she really influenced him.
He didn't teach women.
And then he ended up not only teaching women, but he also got insecure time because of her.
So she had a very big, there was a cross cultural exchange there.
And she did become somewhat of a celebrity in the yoga circuit.
And towards her death, she was much more influential in Argentina.
So that's why I don't think as many Americans know of her.
But I want to pull back from that and look at the celebrity influence in the burgeoning fields of fitness.
So we're talking like the early 80s at this point in your book.
So, I know you're a fan of the show Physical, at least we've talked about it on social media and I like it, but I'm thinking of the moment when you mentioned Cher, who has long been a heroine in the gay community, but she was also the face of Jack LaLanne, who is very masculine, but she was an early AIDS activist.
So there's this paradox going on in the marketing versus who she was.
And, you know, overall celebrities, that's the thing.
And even we kind of see this in the show physical that people in that position can afford to work out more than average people can.
And the industry also Also, self-selects for the pretty people who are already fit and toned.
That's something I noticed over the 17 years I worked at Equinox and their ad campaigns.
Do you think that this focus on celebrities, and specifically celebrities with good bodies, does it damage the expectations of the average person who just wants to get in shape?
It is so hard.
If I knew the answer to that, I'd probably, I don't know, have some multi-zillion dollar gym that marketed things in just the right way.
It's really hard to know.
I mean, I think that one of the reasons so many people embark on their fitness journeys is because they saw someone on TV or on a billboard and said, hey, maybe I could look like that or I want to do what she's doing.
And that's something that the fitness industry has, you know, to use a not so nice term, exploited or taken advantage of.
I think that, you know, I even with all that I know about the problems of the fitness industry, I tend to think things that encourage people to kind of get moving and discover what they like and be more in their own bodies tend to be good things.
So if a picture of Cher with her rock-hard abs gets you in the door, I think that that's okay.
But I do think overall that the kind of centrality of a kind of conventionally beautiful or famous person to marketing particular bodies has been really, really damaging.
I think that story is kind of familiar around women.
I'm not the first one to talk about, before Instagram, magazines.
I go into some of this in the book, but I grew up in the 90s.
I'm 43, so I was a teen in the 90s.
That was like, I remembered it as like kind of a girl power moment.
Like I felt excited that I was growing up in this time and I read all those magazines and they didn't, I don't remember them feeling particularly problematic, but I look back now at those fitness magazines and they were like, get your perfect prom arms, lose that weight, flat belly.
Here's a, or here's a woman with a real body and the real body was like a size four and And so I think that like, you know, there's so much of that is really damaging for women.
But I think back to your point about and it's connected to celebrity culture and magazine culture and all the rest and social media has made that so much worse in a lot of ways.
But I think that the less conventional story, which I go into a little bit in the book, is actually about men too.
And I think that if you think about like, The male bodies on screen, particularly in the 80s in Terminator and when Schwarzenegger went mainstream and all those superheroes, we've had this kind of muscular creep, I guess, or whatever you would call it, where the men that you see on screen, if you compare them to Eugene Sandow, who was freakish for his muscularity, Eugene Sandow looks like any guy you'd see lifting at the weight room at Equinox today.
The guys on stage today, sorry, the guys in movies today look like, I mean, like Greek statues.
And so that's mainstreamed, of course, steroid use and all the rest.
And so I think for men and women, like the celebrity influence can be good, but it also can just create these such unattainable standards of body.
So I agree with you in terms of whatever gets people in is good.
And often, you've probably experienced this, students will come in for one reason and then completely change for another reason and focus on something else.
But thinking broadly at this point, and I've just started working on a book on male body dysmorphia, so this is something that's really on the top of my head as well.
What are your thoughts on gym marketing promoting eating disorders and exercise addiction?
I think it's bad and I think it happens all the time.
If I'm just looking at the bubble of my personal experience in New York City, probably the secondary market I'm most targeted by is in Los Angeles, I'm like, The wellness language is winning and as bad faith as it is, no one talks about bikini bodies anymore.
And you know, it feels like at least the language of kind of body positivity or even body neutrality has really infiltrated the fitness industry.
I think that's true for a certain kind of, honestly, higher price point customer.
But if I really expand my world and I look at the people who have millions of followers, that same rhetoric around before and after pictures, around miraculous transformations, around weight loss as the ultimate goal, is still so, so powerful.
This is not an original thought, but the 24-7 dimension of social media and that marketing allows it to just permeate everything that we do.
I think it's still very much a problem, although I do think that the wellness talk, at least, has permeated a lot of aspects of the fitness industry.
That can be good, but big caveat there is it also can obscure and make it harder to detect much more damaging stuff.
I don't know if I've talked about it with you guys before.
You know, like, some of what's supposed to be a more elevated form of rhetoric is so transparently, like, moralizing and terrible, like, oh, clean eating and detox and self-care.
Like, that all sounds so, like, elevated and wonderful, but actually often it just masks the same kind of, like, restriction and deprivation and, like, you know, transforming your physicality.
But it makes it harder to speak about it or to detect it.
A kind of puritanical self-mastery and moralism that sort of equates what you look like to your level of virtue.
And that's part of what I was talking about with Indra Devi, right?
So we've looked at how so many wellness influencers have flipped really easily into COVID denial or being anti-vaccine and conspiracy theorists, etc.
Indra Devi, I would speculate, may have been one of those because she's saying the real yogi doesn't need pills and surgeries and has no need for medical science because yoga is enough, right?
Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised.
And I mean, I think that the COVID moment has kind of like pulled back the curtain in a lot of ways on a lot of people in a lot of different ways.
But All of this individualistic rhetoric and all of this embrace of kind of like self-determination over your health and kind of the intuitive wisdom of the body, it's been pushed really to its limit.
And I think watching, I mean, you guys are the experts at unpacking this stuff, but it's been fascinating to see Who kind of ran with that and has gone into like anti-vax, you know, conspiracism in a lot of ways.
And who I think has really reckoned with the fact that like, yeah, I believe that you have a certain degree of control over your health and your body and that's great, but that's not an absolute kind of belief or an absolute ideology.
And there's a place for vaccines, there's a place for public health and collective health within that.
I mean, it's been hard for me, honestly, in COVID, too.
I talk about it a little bit in the author's note, that one of the things that was so strange is that going to the gym before COVID was the ultimate, simple, good act.
You're going to the gym.
You feel good about it.
You feel good when people see you going to the gym.
It's just good.
And then that turned into this like act of recklessness overnight, because what, you're going to go and breathe heavy and be around other people?
Like, you're so selfish.
And so that's, I think it was really hard for a lot of folks.
And that doesn't even talk about the industry impact.
Yeah, back to what you were saying about kind of libertarian, you know, self-absorbed sort of focus or moralism around that kind of individual accomplishment.
One thing we found in our work is that you don't have to scratch the surface very hard to find links between the ideals of physical culture and fascism, or eugenics, or at the very least libertarian individualism.
You mentioned Eugene Sandow, the father of eugenics, named after his first name, very early on in the text.
We've also talked already about one of the objections to fitness initiatives, both under Eisenhower and Kennedy, being the sense that you're imposing a militaristic program that has questionable political overtones.
It might be un-American.
Here's a quote back to you.
We need exercises that require effort, precision, and accuracy to discipline the mind and strengthen the will and to give a satisfaction of accomplishment.
And you're quoting here from the Daily Health Builder and saying that it had counseled skeptical readers in this way in 1928.
Ahead of its time, the text recommended deliberate exercise as, quote, the method that nature used to make a superior race out of the ruck of the common crowd.
Yikes.
The stakes were, this is you now, the stakes were racial, spiritual, and moral.
Quick fix pills, massage, or even passive displays of piety were no substitute for physical exertion.
For faith without works is dead.
But I want to say here that all of that said, as fitness goes more mainstream, it becomes associated to some extent with liberal political associations like body positivity, women's lib, transcending of our socialized hang-ups by the time we get into the late 60s, right?
Spiritual self-discovery.
And as much as I hear you in the text criticizing some of the co-opting that happens for commercial gain and the political posturing that's really just about marketing, at one point you sum it up this way.
Jazzercise did not overhaul the patriarchy, but it did soften the edges.
And of course, through all of this, some influential voices of the time are obviously being really thoughtful about how to position fitness in relation to political liberation.
Others are, of course, wanting to give that hip appearance while really exploiting it or promising sexual desirability.
And still others are promoting this splendid but usually privileged solitude of self-discovery, or as one popular short story had it, the loneliness of the long-distance runner, right?
This individual heroic figure.
So I know I just said a lot there, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on how you think about this larger arc of these competing motivations with their often opposing ideologies, all really jostling together to shape a fitness culture that nonetheless keeps moving forward in important ways, even if it's under delivering on like the grandiose claims, right?
Absolutely.
Well articulated, that overview.
Let me start with something very simple and visual.
The cover of the book is purple.
I didn't design it, but it's that purple yoga mat that I think any yogi will recognize.
I asked my editor, I said, was this on purpose?
Because like blue and red America, you know, like both conservative and liberal.
And he's like, I'm not sure.
But I think that that is an important kind of signal because of exactly what you're saying, Julian, that one of the reasons that fitness culture kind of soldiers on and morphs and takes different shapes and appeals to so many different communities It's not like it changed from this conservative project of disciplining the flesh to this liberal project of political emancipation.
Those tensions have always kind of existed.
And they take different form in different moments, but one of the reasons that this is so enduring, fitness culture, is because there is both this, like, you know, I guess we can call it conservative sense of like, this is about discipline, this is about self-control, this is about restriction, this is about personal responsibility for your own health and for your own life.
That squares very well with conservatives and with libertarians.
And I have like a whole thing about Mormons in there and running.
And like, you know, Oral Roberts University fundamentalists are like on board for jogging.
At the same time, jogging becomes this countercultural thing that's about communing with the land, about a natural euphoric high.
It's connected to like people who are seekers, like in terms of like, you know, experimenting with psychedelics and all of this other stuff.
Women who are, you know, activists who are petitioning to make the distances.
They're allowed to run longer.
I mean, I think running and the jogging craze really shows how all of those things can coexist.
Often very sincerely.
And I spend a lot of time talking about kind of like bad faith manipulations of like, you know, these kind of more philosophical claims.
But I really do believe that fitness culture is so powerful in our country because all of those things can coexist.
You can look at the same activity and see it as an opportunity for kind of ascetic self-discipline or like, you know, exciting self-determination.
I'm not gonna, you know, I'm taking control of my own health means very different things.
If you're someone, a marginalized person, who's always felt the medical establishment looks down on them and is kind of telling them, oh, you don't know your body, oh, you don't know what's going on, then that feels great.
Very similarly for a conservative, Yeah, I'm going to take care of my own health.
I don't need the government.
I don't need health care.
My body and my life is in my hands.
That squares very well with that sentiment.
That's what I think is so incredible about it.
It's also probably why my fitness social contacts are by far the most politically diverse group that I know.
By far!
The people that I know in academia...
I mean, I don't want to make assumptions, but I know they're vaccinated.
I can be pretty confident in how they voted.
You know, the fitness crew is like a total wild card collection of beliefs.
So there's something nice about that, I think, honestly.
As long as you don't mind them being unvaccinated.
Right, right, right.
Totally.
Open air environments, open air environments, yeah.
These are my open air friends.
Yeah.
As you were just touching on, when you get into the 60s and 70s in the book, there are two streams that really captured my imagination because I'm really obsessed with this period.
One is about women literally, in some cases, fighting for the right to run in marathons.
Serious runners having to, serious female runners having to endure the marketing fiasco of a so-called mini marathon for women because running longer distances is, of course, dangerous to their femininity in some way, right?
But of course, the mini marathon turns out to be sponsored by crazy legs shaving cream and the women literally are running in mini skirts and then they're posing at the beginning with Playboy bunnies.
You also write about how women had to wear several pairs of socks to fill out men's running shoes because there just wasn't any athletic apparel for women and that's kind of mind-blowing.
You write about the development of the first jog bra that's sort of like conceived of as a double jock strap up in a way.
You know, because that's, that's what exists.
So whatever you want to talk about in this regard, I think it's such a fascinating period.
The three names that stood out for me were, were Catherine Switzer, obviously Linda Huey and Cindy Poore.
You tell their stories really beautifully.
How, how did they, how did they and women like them sort of change the culture in this period?
Yeah.
So, okay, Katherine Switzer is definitely the most famous of that trio, and I drew very much on her memoir.
So she is known for, she signs up under her initials to run the Boston Marathon because women were not allowed.
And it is the race director, Jock Semple, attempts to push her off the course.
And there's a very famous picture of that.
And she perseveres.
She finishes the race.
And, you know, she's a total trailblazer and has made her whole career.
She still speaks and writes and talks about this.
What was really interesting to me about all three of those women, and I'll talk about the other two in a second, is like none of them saw themselves as feminists.
Like actually not like almost I don't want to say they were anti-feminist, but they were coming of age in this period.
All of them in all of them in California.
No, not all of them in California, but all of them in environments where they were very aware Of the ferment around women's politics.
And they did not want to be identified as that.
And Katherine Switzer actually writes that, you know, she was really resistant to and like not so happy with feminists kind of appropriating her running as part of their cause.
And she had sort of this mentality as like, well, I'm just a runner.
I just want to run.
That's what I want to do.
She kind of comes around later and especially during that race where Jacque Semple tries to push her off.
Part of the reason she doesn't get pushed off is she's running with her boyfriend at that time, who fends off Jacques Semple.
And her boyfriend was aspiring to, I think, go to Olympic trials for, I want to say shop put, but I could be getting that wrong.
And he gets so pissed at her because Now he's attacked a race official and he can't go on to pursue his own dreams.
So according to her memoir, she's saying, well, you know, I ended the race, but I was crying because he was basically breaking up with me, telling me I'm a no good jogger.
I'm so slow anyway.
Why did I throw away my athletic career just to protect you?
And it's so interesting because this is remembered as this feminist watershed and And not only was she not claiming that feminist, like, you know, title, but she also was enduring the most, like, typical kind of dressing down that we think about in patriarchal hetero relationships.
So anyway, so that's her.
But these other two women, Linda Huey and Cindy Poore.
So Linda Huey is a really interesting figure who's a little bit older.
And so she was a runner and she was constantly training with the men and the boys growing up in the San Jose area and it was a really impressive track team.
But she I use really to show how coming of age before Title IX, the landmark legislation that really changed sports for women, she basically had to go into school to become a physical education teacher because that was essentially all that was open to girls who were jocks.
And she wrote this memoir really reckoning with what it meant to be, it's a subtitle of the book, a woman, an athlete.
She also did not want to be at all associated with feminism.
And what she talks about there is actually something different from many women sports activists.
She was like, yeah, well, you know, there were all these women in the physical education department, but I didn't want anything to do with any of them.
One, there were these super masculine, she calls them hercs.
And she's like, I didn't want anything to do with them.
And I always made sure I had a cute boyfriend on my arm to like show I wasn't one of them.
But then there were all these like girls who were not real athletes.
And they would say like, you know, the juice and cookies at the end is really the important part of girls physical activity.
Like it's really about like team members, like team playing and like having fun together.
And she's like, I want to compete.
And so it's a really interesting career arc that she describes and so many frustrations in kind of navigating that space.
Just a little fact there that shows you how constraining this must be.
She talks about in the early 1960s, being a physical education major, it was the only major where there was a requirement that the girls had to wear sweaters and skirts.
Everybody else could wear pants because they so had to kind of like to perform their femininity in that department.
So yeah, and then not to go on too much, but Cindy Poore, I was lucky to be able to interview at the Nike headquarters, which was an amazing place to go visit.
Not too far from you now, Derek.
I don't know if you've been to Beaverton, but Cindy Poore was also a track runner and she was interesting for a lot of reasons.
Also, not being able to imagine an athletic career for herself as a woman going on to compete at very high levels, but also she was organizing women's track meets through Campus
And so to me it was so interesting to talk to her because she also still interviewing her in like I think 2017 or 18 she was like oh no no I'm not one of those feminists like I was just doing it because we wanted to run this was something girls should you know be able to do and so it's interesting I'm just fascinated by that tension these women are trailblazers but not all trailblazers are claiming that feminist mantle and that's something we should pay attention to
Another theme, we touched upon eating disorders, but that would also, I would argue, in an outsized manner addresses women, is fat shaming.
This is a particularly nuanced topic.
I mentioned the book that I'm working on and that book came because I grew up overweight and then I suffered from an eating disorder for about 15 years of my life.
So, this is a very charged environment to be talking about this.
I think it's super important to holistically address the problem of obesity, because I'm not one to pretend it doesn't exist, and sometimes we go so far in one way that we're like, oh no, it's not a problem, because it is a problem.
That said, there are plenty of headlines that skew the fact that weight is not the unhealthy factor that some make it out to be, and there are plenty of people who present as perhaps being overweight, but are actually healthier than people who are much thinner.
Overall, like what did you learn about obesity and gym culture while working on the book?
It's so hard because this is such a kind of like, you know, fraught conversation right now.
And I'm also aware that, you know, I possess a certain degree of thin privilege and talking about this stuff.
So what I tried to do as a historian is to stick very close to the sources and to kind of chart the rise of the obesity epidemic, panic and the very real concerns that it addressed, but also the critiques of it.
I don't know.
It's hard to kind of answer your question, I guess.
In sticking to the sources, one of the things that I discovered is that, yeah, fat shaming is not a new thing.
It has existed throughout all of history.
We have gotten better in a lot of ways in the fitness industry, I think, at certainly backing down from the more explicit forms of fat shaming.
There are so many that are still layered in to even what are considered kind of evolved approaches.
I mean, one of the things and this is in the latter part of the book that I found really interesting and disturbing are the number of fat people who exercise and often are quite accomplished in fitness who find people being like, good for you.
Way to get started.
As if the fat body that they inhabit is an indication that one, they should be a body in transition, but two, that they are beginners at fitness.
I found, there's a wonderful classic book called The Fat Studies Reader, which I found so important in helping me frame these issues through the lens of, you know, the activist lens of the fat studies movement and of fat liberation.
Again, this is like taking me very close to the sources here, but I think it's really interesting.
One thing that I didn't know very much about, but in the 1980s you have this like huge aerobic boom.
Jane Fonda's the most famous face of that.
Obviously very thin, white.
Celebrity woman.
But one of the things that it spawns is this whole fat aerobics movement.
And what comes out of that, which is really interesting, is there's a certain degree of a kind of, you know, a little bit of a kind of like fat liberation sense of like, well, we belong here too.
And we want fat, fat, you know, aerobics classes with fat instructors and fat where fat women feel welcome.
Like that In itself is so new in that period.
These two women who go to start a studio cannot find one fat woman with a certification to teach.
Crazy!
And so they all go out and get certified in order to start teaching themselves.
But they also find that at that point, the sense among fat women, and I spoke more about fat women, but I think about fat men too, is like, they didn't belong in a gym because you had to be fit to go to a gym in the first place.
And I think that's still with us too in certain more elite gym environments, but it was so pronounced and so extreme.
And so the people that push back on that, honestly, even in problematic ways, like Richard Simmons and like some of these fat aerobics people, we now look back at them and I think we often are like, oh my God, they were actually so fat shaming because they're like telling you, you too can be skinny and fit and beautiful and presuming you want to lose that weight.
But just to be seen as people who would or want to or could engage in the pursuit of fitness was really a novel thing.
So Derek, to get back to your original point, I do think we're at an interesting moment and an important moment in the kind of contemporary discourse where there's been, I think, a really, really welcome pushback on the kind of medicalizing of fat hatred through like, well, you know, basically like health trolling, right?
Like, I'm just worried about your health.
I think that has been really damaging.
At the same point, especially coming out of the pandemic and a lot of enforced sedentariness, we do have weight-related health issues in this country.
And we are sticking our head in the sand to act like addressing those is only a form of fat hatred.
It should not be that way.
So I'm hoping that we can move forward on that conversation.
But it's a really tough one.
When people want to interview me about this stuff, it's one of the topics I get most nervous about.
Yeah, really tough one.
And to the point of what Derek was saying earlier too about, you know, working at Equinox and which instructors get chosen for the promotional photographs, right?
It's like, it's the same thing in yoga.
People, the people who end up becoming the face of commercialized yoga are people who are genetically quite flexible and thin and pretty.
And yoga is not necessarily going to change you into that, but it's like the aspiration of like, I want to feel the way How they look, how I imagine how they look would feel to be.
And it's, it's just all of it is, is such a minefield.
And the same, the same, I think with, with fitness, with general fitness is that, you know, there's probably a lot of people who genetically are just have certain body proportions.
And so then the, the, the implicit claim is that if you do this kind of workout, you too will have those body proportions.
And that's just not true.
Like it's, it's totally self-selected, you know?
I know.
One of the things that's interesting, and I certainly found it at Equinox, but I think it's also true of a brand many people probably know of, Peloton, is that fitness, because it's body work, is extra invested in its forward face being those really conventionally hot, fit-looking bodies.
Often under the radar, a lot of the people who are actually using these products and engaging in these communities do not look like that.
I found that so much at Equinox.
Yes, it was downtown New York City, so they're probably more conventionally attractive than your average American gym in the middle of anywhere.
Most of them did not look like the people on those billboards.
Peloton, it's even more extreme.
Now they've moved their marketing a little bit, but they have millions of users.
And if you go into those Peloton user groups, it is not the rich person looking over Aspen on their Peloton.
It tends to be like, my husband and I split a membership.
Our kids used it.
I'm like a first responder, so I work all night.
It's a totally different vibe than what's promoted.
So I think fitness is interesting because we often think about other industries.
They're actually promoting, look how diverse we are.
And then you get in the door and they're like actually much more homogeneous than you think.
I think in some ways in fitness, there is this, that dynamic is not totally absent in fitness.
But in fitness, there's often this dynamic of like promoting, oh, everyone here has six pack abs and is 24.
And then you get in the door And it actually looks much more sort of heterogeneous and inclusive.
So that's a really interesting thing about the industry.
They always kind of have to sell a degree of exclusivity and youth and bodily, you know, bodily fitness, apparent fitness, I should say.
Yeah, you know, I mentioned earlier that there were two streams once we got into the 60s and especially the 70s that I found enthralling.
The second one of those brings us to Esalen.
And in fact, you start in part four mentioning Bernard Gunther.
And did you actually talk to Meron Gunther?
Is he still around?
I didn't.
He was not someone I could interview.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I knew him.
In fact, he was kind of a mentor to me in the 90s and he was already pushing 70.
I was probably around 24, 25.
And yeah, he was just a really interesting character.
I'd lost touch with him since and I wondered if he was still around.
I mean, I would imagine he'd probably passed away a while ago.
I'm so glad to hear that.
He was one of the people I didn't get to reach out to and actually interview, but yeah, he is very prevalent in the sources, as you saw.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I mean, it's here that we find these countercultural notions of loosening up.
Becoming authentic, discovering your human potential to use the term, releasing the repressive tension of a square society through a kind of naturalistic embrace of nudity and emotional vulnerability.
You have like group process and this starts to really color not only how we think about physical activities, but also it puts a new spin.
Now we've talked about the sort of mystical aspects, right?
That you see with running and of course you see with yoga.
But it also puts the spin now on social and political revolution.
And there's a misguided aspect of this that you describe that I think finds a kind of high point in this encounter group between Black Panthers and well-meaning white liberals up at Esalen in Big Sur.
Tell us about that.
Yeah, so that I first learned of from Adam Curtis's wonderful documentary on Esalen, which everybody should go watch because there's footage of this.
But, you know, Esalen, so much of what it was selling at that period was this idea, to simplify a bit, but if you strip away all these external indicators of who you are in this hierarchical society, you can get at a kind of authentic human connection and authentic sense of self.
So what else would you apply that to that all the civil rights struggles going on at that time, right?
And so they bring together a group of Black Panthers and some white people who were probably going there with good intentions, I assume, in order to have this encounter group and to kind of come to some sort of, you know, collective humanity, sense of you know, collective humanity, sense of their collective humanity.
It goes terribly.
And it goes terribly because, you know, I think given the license to sort of say whatever they want and quote unquote be authentic, some of the white folks start saying pretty offensive things.
One of the black men says like, you're calling me a black buck, like, you know, obviously responding to some like really awful things that were being said.
And I think Also, it made very clear that for folks who were involved in the black freedom struggles of that time, some of the deepest senses of power that they had were through these collective group based identities, right?
And so there, what was this sense, I think, in that interaction, but also at Esalen overall, in terms of what they were promoting to solve these naughty social problems, That, wow, this was a moment when there was becoming much more awareness of how much those external identities and that collective solidarity actually mattered, and that a kind of true good life, if it was possible, had to embrace those or acknowledge those rather than strip them away.
And that sense of colorblindness or kind of cosmic connectedness might be nice, but that was not for this world.
And I think that interaction really crystallized that really, really well.
Yeah, you know, I just wanted to say as well and along those same lines, I just thought of an experience I had maybe two or three years ago where I was leading an ecstatic dance event and at the end we were all standing in a big closing circle as you do and people got to say their name and say something they wanted to say and there was one black man in the room and it happened to be a guy who I worked very closely with who came and helped me set up and tear down and he and I would drum together and all that kind of stuff so people knew him He quite well knew who he was.
And when it came to be his turn, he said his name and then he said, what does it mean to be black?
And he sort of posed it as a question to the room.
And this is, you know, a lot of boomers and, and some Gen Xers and some, some people a little younger, but a lot of white liberal, very like Esalen visiting types of people.
And just about everyone in that circle said, it doesn't mean anything.
I see you as a spirit.
I see you as the pure manifestation of your musical genius.
I see you as a dancer with some kind of quantum indeterminacy.
There's nothing about blackness and whiteness.
Who cares?
And it was really wild because I could tell he was standing there being like, oh, you people don't fucking get it.
Yeah it's really like it's this is not something we have an answer to but one of the things one of my big worries in writing this book was that this was going to be like too white of a story because for some of the reasons that we talked about earlier on like whether it was as a project of explicit like white racial preservation or whether as a fix for white suburban kids who were getting too soft
around the middle or whether it's SoulCycle Women in the early 2000s, there was a danger that this could be a story about the pursuit of something that white people did.
And that's not the story that I wanted to tell.
And so what I've tried to do throughout the book is kind of show how that sense of whiteness was constructed, how fitness in many ways, when used by white people, was like as a mode of differentiating themselves from the physicality of black people, but also to engage with the many was like as a mode of differentiating themselves from the physicality of black people, but also to engage with the many black people And one of the things per your point that I think is really interesting is that
Is that I actually interviewed black people who also subscribe to that sort of like colorblind sensibility.
There were some people definitely who expressed what it sounds like was the exasperation of your of your friend there of kind of like oh my god like yes I feel connected to you but this doesn't go away for me in terms of how I engage with the world.
But then there were other folks, I think who, or I know because they told me in their interview, who kind of found like, oh, well, fitness is this sort of like weird subcultural space where some of those things still matter, but seem a little bit on hold because of the bizarre culture that it is, or the bizarre kind of set of beliefs that dominate here.
That said, All of the same disparities of the broader culture exist in terms of pay and access and, you know, obesity statistics, etc.
So I try to really hit that balance and to do so with as much sensitivity as possible.
And I did the best I can.
Let's talk about one of those interviews, because you talked to our mutual friend, Monique Dash, and about racism in gym culture, exactly that.
And, you know, I was critical of Equinox before, and Monique, we know through Equinox, for some of their marketing, but I would argue they were very early in using very diverse models across genders and races, and also very early in marketing proudly of gay people and their bodies.
So those are all good things that I really appreciate about Equinox.
Looking at from when Monique started in the 80s in this period we were just talking about with Esalen to today, do you think there's been shifts in attitudes around racism in gym culture or is it still exclusive in certain ways to whites that can afford certain gyms?
I think the gyms have become much more inclusive, but they tend to be inclusive in that capitalistic way of, hey, if you can pay, we want you to show up, and even better, if you look fit.
And the definition of what fit is has expanded, but I think the ultimate example of that is the way that Equinox and lots of other places lean so heavily into embracing LGBTQ stuff, but often do so with marketing, like the kind of like conventionally hot, super ripped, usually male, white or not always white, but male body.
And so I think there's a professor at Princeton whose work I admire a lot, Kiyanga Yamada Taylor.
And she talks about a concept I wish I knew when I wrote the book, predatory inclusion, which can mean a lot of things.
She doesn't talk about the fitness industry, but I think it's very apt there where, yes, we want to include you, but often the inclusivity is in a kind of damaging paradigm already.
And so I think that, yes, like.
In simple terms, the fitness industry has actually gotten a lot more inclusive, certainly in its marketing, but also in a lot of its practice.
But I do think there is still absolutely very much a pay-to-play sensibility, and that a lot of the same inequalities that exist in the broader world exist absolutely at the gym.
I could give you a million examples.
I don't know what that looks like, but I think a lot of them are actually pretty predictable in terms of patriarchy and racism and sizeism and the rest.
There are so many rich themes and so many just great stories that you tell throughout the book.
I feel like we could spend another hour at least talking about all of these things.
But as my last question to you, I'm just curious where you arrived at, because I know this is one of the questions that you think about a lot.
How do you think about this dance between cultural and commercial and even political ways of positioning physical culture in terms of the central question about how a country so obsessed with exercise can be kind of chronically unfit or unwell?
How do you think about that in the final analysis?
So, individual fitness is not the cure for collective ill.
I think that that's just true.
And I don't have the tools to heal our societal illness.
I do think in the realm of fitness, I can confidently say we will be a better society if we can create more opportunities for people to move on their own terms.
And that means thinking about movement as not something that's imposed as a form of bodily discipline or punishment or something which is exorbitantly expensive or inaccessible, but that we expand the definition of what exercise is and we create opportunities for more people to, as I say, engage in it on their own terms.
And that means fixes that are very connected to exercise spaces like physical education class, public recreation centers, workplace wellness initiatives, etc.
But it also means looking at all of the inequalities that structure life more broadly.
Like the massive shift to kind of shift labor and labor insecurity and food insecurity and residential segregation means that one of the biggest indications of gentrification in a neighborhood is like all these fitness studios and wellness businesses popping up.
Meanwhile, if you don't know whether you're working the night shift or the morning shift tomorrow and you have to drive very far to leave your child somewhere, not to mention to get groceries, are you really building in time for exercise?
Even if you can get it very affordably at a Planet Fitness or on YouTube, probably not.
So my take is that there are ways to create this opportunity for a more egalitarian fitness culture that are associated with specific exercise spaces, but also we can't fix this stuff without looking at the broader inequalities that structure our society.
So that's maybe not a very satisfying answer, but I think that is where we are.
And I remain convinced of the power of fitness to have a very important and positive influence on people's lives, but I also know it can be traumatizing.
