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60: Dismantling Long and Lean Part 1
1.4k Plays1 year ago
Welcome to Season 4 and Episode 60 of the Movement Logic podcast! In this much requested first part of a three-part episode series, Laurel and Sarah discuss the phrase long and lean from a historical and sociological perspective. They cover the idealized image of women through art with a historical gaze, then unpick the narrative around becoming long and lean, how diet and exercise became front and center for this impossible ideal, and where we are today with social media, photoshop, and AI in the mix.
You will learn:
- How bad Medieval artists were at drawing human bodies
- How the Renaissance ideal form was the exact opposite of long and lean
- “Ideal” female forms through the 20th and 21st centuries
- The inherent misogyny, internalized anxiety, and social pressure of long and lean
- Whether the diet and exercise boom of the 1980s had anything to do with health
- Why GOOP is indeed a four letter word
- How ‘problem areas’ keep us busy objectifying our bodies and how this is a feature of our modern capitalist society
And more!
Sign up here to get on the Wait List for our next Bone Density Course in October 2024!
Reference links:
The Toast Looks Back: The Best Of Two Monks
https://greatist.com/grow/100-years-womens-body-image#1
https://www.worldometers.info/weight-loss/
Recommended
Transcript
Apology and Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey everybody, this is Sarah, and I have a quick note about today's show before we get started. We had some major problems with the audio that were entirely my fault. Laurel and I discussed re-recording, but we quite honestly don't have the bandwidth or the time, so apologies. The sound is a bit messed up. It will be better on future episodes, and
00:00:25
Speaker
If you would like to complain about it, feel free to give us a five star review and complain about the sound quality. Thanks, you guys. Enjoy the show.
00:00:38
Speaker
Welcome to the Movement Logic podcast with yoga teacher and strength coach Laurel Beaversdorf and physical therapist Dr. Sarah Court. With over 30 years combined experience in the yoga, movement, and physical therapy worlds, we believe in strong opinions loosely held, which means we're not hyping outdated movement concepts. Instead, we're here with up-to-date and cutting-edge tools, evidence, and ideas to help you as a mover and a teacher.
00:01:15
Speaker
Welcome to Season 4 of the Movement Logic Podcast.
Podcast Milestone and Schedule
00:01:18
Speaker
I'm Dr. Sarah Court, and I'm here with my co-host, Laurel Beaversdorf.
00:01:22
Speaker
Well, it's season four. This is our 60th episode. Can you believe it? Uh, no. I mean, I feel like we've been doing this forever. So in that sense, yes. But the idea that we've actually, I can't believe we've thought of 60 things to talk about. You know what I mean? I can believe that actually. I can think of 60,000 more things. In fact, it
00:01:51
Speaker
haunts me the number of things that I want to be talking about. It's constant in my brain. But I can't believe that we have been able to, given how busy both of us are, commit to this process of creating podcast episodes. Because it is, as we've discussed, it's a lot of work. But I think what keeps me going at least is just how much I enjoy talking to you.
00:02:19
Speaker
and collaborating with you and how much I get to learn about the topics we talk about through our conversations. So that's what's in it for me. Me too. I feel exactly the same way. So speaking of being busy people, we have decided now starting with season four, we are for season four going to be doing episodes every other week instead of every week because we are walking our talk and prioritizing a little more self-care.
00:02:46
Speaker
which if you know either of us is not especially easy for us to do, we're going to try it and see if we implode from just being so relaxed. Um, but I'm not seriously though, I'm not trying to glamorize the hustle. I'm just trying to do a better job of not overworking, which I am prone to doing. And I think you are as well.
00:03:05
Speaker
Yeah, I think that what I've enjoyed so far about this once every two weeks plan is being able to spend actually a little bit more time researching and reading. And so that's felt really like less urgent and just more enjoyable. Thanks.
Program Success Stories and Future Plans
00:03:23
Speaker
Before we get into it, I wanted to talk with you a little bit about our bone density program, Lift for Longevity, and how cool it is. We're about halfway through the six month program. It's been phenomenal. And what's been so super exciting for me is seeing all of these women, 90 women,
00:03:44
Speaker
getting stronger and stronger month over month. And we actually just had a special class. It's known as a build-up class. The way we did it was really as a one rep max test. So we basically we did a test how strong that the students are in either the deadlift or the squat, the back squat. And they got to choose which exercise they wanted to build up to.
00:04:10
Speaker
a one repetition right and we had them start off with ten reps easy six reps then four then three then two or four two
00:04:20
Speaker
one, one, one. So they had three attempts at one repetition. And there were so many light bulbs that went off in the session where folks were like, OMG, I am now squatting 30 more pounds as my one rep max. And I
00:04:42
Speaker
Initially thought based on the predictions you would use with a one RM chart or a one RM calculator. And so I think it was just really illuminating to them that actually they could go heavier on those sets of six they could go heavier on those sets of eight they could go heavier on those sets of five right in there. At this point in the program they're already lifting heavy they're lifting.
00:05:01
Speaker
in that, you know, 90, 85 to 95% range for some lifts, for some of the compound lifts. And I think it was just a really great way to isolate maximum force, right? And go, listen, it's only one rep.
00:05:19
Speaker
Could you add five more pounds? And many of them were like, yeah, 15 or 20 more pounds in fact. We were teaching it live and the most fun person to watch was one of our students who, like we were sort of, you know, everybody was kind of like got to their limit and was kind of winding down. And this person, she just kept adding more and more and more.
00:05:40
Speaker
I was like, are you okay? Let's go check in. And what's going on? She's like, Yeah, I keep it keeps being too easy. I was like, Oh, great, go for it. Yeah, I think I know who you're talking about. She ended up with 125 pounds, one rep max on her squat. Yeah. Yeah. Some folks are just naturals at stuff. And I think you might have a natural ability to squat. Yeah. And she and she does. I mean, yeah, you know, she's been in all the live classes, I think for my live sessions and
00:06:08
Speaker
Yeah, she has made enormous progress, but so has everyone. I mean, it's just, it's fun, isn't it? It's super sad. Oh, it's so satisfying. And I was saying during that class as well, but like, but so I get like that level of happy where you start to want to cry a little bit, because it's so satisfying, because I worked so hard on this program a little bit with sort of fingers crossed, because we didn't know if anybody was going to be, we were pretty sure some people would be interested in it.
00:06:35
Speaker
But we had no idea so many people would be interested in it. And it is, you know, there's almost sort of a parental pride feeling in a way where you're seeing these women who are like, I'm putting my trust in you that you are going to safely help me get much stronger. And watching them do it with just, you know, we're honestly kind of minimal guidance from us, you know, maybe a bit more in the beginning, but now they're really just taking control of it and just flying. And it's so satisfying. We're in the fine tuning
00:07:04
Speaker
stage right now in terms of technique for most people in the program. And now what we're working on is we're working on what it means to lift heavy. Like what that feels like and then getting used to that and then being able to accurately predict that exertion level that we're trying to target and the load selection that would get us there. And this all just takes time, which is why it's a six month course. And I think that it definitely couldn't have been shorter.
00:07:33
Speaker
And it's probably going to want to be longer, but we have plans for this cohort for next cycle. And, and, you know, we just ultimately, we want to create, uh, basically just a group of bad-ass women who pick up heavy shit together. Like that's, that's what I'm trying to do here.
00:07:52
Speaker
100%. So if you are listening to this, and you're like, Oh, that sounds cool. I didn't really know much about it, or I missed the last one. We are, we have a waitlist that you can sign up for, for the 2024 cohort, it will start in October. And so if you get on the waitlist, you will not only hear about all of this ahead of time, but that is the only, I repeat, only place to get the discounted price for 2024. So
00:08:22
Speaker
There will be a link in the show
New Series and Beauty Ideals Through History
00:08:24
Speaker
notes. There are links all over the place. If you follow us on Instagram, you'll see the links in the movement logic page on Laurel and my personal pages. So you cannot get away from this link, but it will take you to the signup page. Even if you are already on our mailing list, sign up for this because it's going to segment you into our wait list. And again, that's the only place where you're going to get the discount for next year. So if you're into it and you want to figure out you're a planner, I'm a planner. If you're a planner like me and you're like, I know it's only
00:08:52
Speaker
I was about to say March. I know it's only January. It's not March. But I want to, you know, whether I do it or not, I want to access at least the discount for this. So get yourselves on our list. And again, the link is in the show notes. Okay. Finally.
00:09:09
Speaker
75 minutes later, we're going to get into the topic. So today's episode is part one of a three part series that we are calling dismantling long and lean. We have had many, many requests to talk about the phrase long and lean, and it's different iterations and sources, whether it's from the yoga world,
00:09:33
Speaker
Pilates world, social media, diet culture, so on and so on. So each episode of this three-part series will focus on a different aspect of the scourge. Is that how you say that word? Scourge? Scourge. Scourge? I think it's scourge. Scourge. Yeah. It's one of those words where, as I keep saying it, it starts to look so weird.
00:09:55
Speaker
Anyway, the scourge of long and lean. So in this first episode, our focus is on the historical and sociological development of this aesthetic nadir, this epitome of the ideal, the quote unquote perfect female form, aka long and lean. And I put my hand up to do this one because as some of you may know, I was an art history major in college. And so I really enjoy doing the, you know, make a cup of tea, sit down, let me tell you a story kind of episodes.
00:10:22
Speaker
And also, as an art history major, I observed up and close how the ideal female form has morphed throughout the centuries through various art forms, and I want to tell you about it. Also, you have a modeling background as well, which I also find deeply relevant to this topic. Yes. And I kind of didn't put a lot of notes in about that, but we can for sure talk about it. I mean, anyway, yes. So I'm going through mine.
00:10:51
Speaker
The third right of all these variations on the ideal female form is, of course, the male gaze, whether it's overtly placed on women or internalized by women and repurposed as a requirement for femininity, which is then, of course, also suggesting that women's main role is to live up to a male standard.
00:11:10
Speaker
which for most of history has been the headliner with exceptions in certain civilizations and certain eras. This episode could literally be a college course if we wanted to make it one, but we don't have the time or the bandwidth. So it's going to be a CliffsNotes version. We're also not academics. I mean, I think we are academic. That's true. We're not in academia. That's true. I'm not tenured anywhere, but I'm tenacious.
00:11:41
Speaker
You are in my book. Oh, thanks. So I don't want to spend a lot of time during this episode repeating the concept that this ideal takes place under the male gaze. So let's just start from a place of assuming that that's what we're talking about. And then the other thing I wanted to say up front is that this is the European slash North American Western ideal through history. And it would also be multiple college courses to cover this ideal in every other artistic and cultural history.
00:12:08
Speaker
So the history of art we will be going into here is European and North American because that is what I know the most about and it is the basis for a lot of the Western aesthetic we see today. So we're going to look at the idealized image of women through art with a historical gaze and then as we enter the second half of the 1900s we're going to start to unpick the narrative around becoming long and lean where it might have come from
00:12:32
Speaker
how diet and exercise became front and center to attempt to attain or maintain this impossible ideal, and where we are today with social media, Photoshop, and AI in the mix. So Laurel, and listeners, let's start with our current day understanding of what long and lean looks like. So Laurel, if I say, imagine a woman who is long and lean, what image does that conjure up for you? What does she look like in your mind's eye?
00:12:59
Speaker
Yeah, if I'm honest and I just go free association, like first thing that comes to mind is someone who is a supermodel, someone who is maybe a ballet dancer, someone who is not what I would describe as muscular in the athletic sense, but rather actually has this delicate, almost fragile,
00:13:25
Speaker
beautiful by kind of really sort of mainstream standards. Disney Princess, I think Disney Princess, I think of someone who is, that doesn't really look like me, but might look a little bit like you, Sarah, but here's where it really got interesting. Cause you know, you gave me this question ahead of time and I did free associate with it. And I was like, but I don't think of Sarah as long and lean.
00:13:55
Speaker
because there's something very when i when i imagine you what i imagine is actually your personality it's like your personality coming through your body so there's like a cleverness there's a no-nonsense aspect there's a silliness
00:14:12
Speaker
There's a little bit of whimsy. Okay, so I would consider whimsy to be kind of in the line of long and lean. Like if someone's long and lean, they're whimsical. They're light like a leaf falling from the tree, right? But you bring so much more nuance and richness, and it's coming from the fact that I know who you are as a person.
00:14:33
Speaker
And so that's when I started to think, when we think of women a lot of times, just a woman, and if we go a long and lean woman, we don't consider the personality at all. It's entirely about this way that this person looks like an unnamed Jane Doe of a template woman who is generic, like a blueprint of a woman that is sort of how we're supposed to want to look.
00:15:04
Speaker
So that's a really interesting point that it's so surface level and it's superficial. It's not who is this person. It's just what is the, like Disney Princess is great. They're cartoons, literally, right? They're drawn. Now, but here's my question.
00:15:20
Speaker
What race is this person? Oh yeah, white. Like free association, like immediately. I thought of like Christie Brinkley, because those were the supermodels of my time, Cindy Crawford. I thought of like Heidi Klum, right?
00:15:37
Speaker
And like ballet dancers that I have the scene on TV, which are overwhelmingly white. Yes. So white. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So I would imagine that a lot of our listeners have the same as yours, Laurel, or a very similar image in mind when we think about Long and Lean. However, Long and Lean was not always the aesthetic goal for women. In fact, during some time periods, it was the absolute opposite of ideal because of what it signified about your social standing in the world.
00:16:06
Speaker
There was a time when you absolutely did not want to be long and lean, but it was a pretty long time ago in Western society. There are some countries and cultures that continue to this day to idealize a larger forum for one, but again, that's not going to be the focus of this episode.
00:16:22
Speaker
So in the interest of this episode ending in under two hours, I'm going to start our art history survey course during the medieval period, mostly because I want to start with something funny. Also, because during the medieval period, nobody knew how to draw anything at all. It was hysterical. So there were a lot of hilarious renditions of male and female bodies. Nobody knew how to draw with scale or perspective or three dimensions. Every animal got a human face.
00:16:51
Speaker
a person and a castle might be the same size, it was quite honestly hilarious. Like, truly, if you want a good laugh, go and look at some early medieval renditions of dogs. Now, most of the time, most of the art of the time was religious, as it was the monks who would painstakingly write out copies of the Bible by hand and also illustrate them.
00:17:11
Speaker
And this leads me to one of my favorite websites of all time, which very sadly stopped creating new content six years ago, but still exists. And if you've never seen it, I am jealous that you get to experience it for the first time. And of course I will link it in the show notes. That website is called The Toast.
00:17:27
Speaker
And it was started by Daniel Mallory Ortberg and Nicole Cliff, and it is an excellent place to spend an afternoon laughing at how funny they both are. And in particular, the art history aspects that they make fun of are hilarious. So they did a bunch of series. One of the series they did was called Two Monks, in which they would write imaginary text conversations between two medieval monks about how to draw things like horses and women and hands, and then show actual pieces of art from the time that are awful attempts at drawing these things.
00:17:57
Speaker
And so I sent Laurel one of my absolute favorites. Laurel, would you please reenact the imaginary text conversation and then attempt to describe to our audience the piece of art in question? Sure. Okay. So Sarah just gave me this like an hour or two ago. Monk one. How much is a woman? Monk two. Like an eighth? Monk one. Ah, T-Y-T-Y, which I think means thank you. Thank you. Yes.
00:18:24
Speaker
All right, so in this picture, I see a man in some colorful garb-like blue robe and an orange scarf-like thing with a round. It almost looks like a rescue inner tube that you find in pools around his head, and he looks a little bit like Jesus, and he's holding a few hands. I'm going to help you out. That's Jesus. Oh, it's Jesus. Okay, this is Jesus.
00:18:48
Speaker
So Jesus is holding on to the arm of a woman, but the arm looks like an infant arm.
00:18:55
Speaker
attached to just the upper, like just below her collarbones. Everything below her collarbones is completely missing from the picture. She's like a floating head with a infant arm. And she looks sad and downtrodden and her eyes are downcast and maybe that's the Virgin Mary. I don't know. And then there's this other dude who is like reclining
00:19:22
Speaker
back on a rock and it looks like he's literally, I'm sorry, this is kind of crude, but it looks like he has his thumb in his crotch and his hand is wrapped around his upper thigh. His rib cage, you can see his ribs are prominent. It almost looks like they drew the top part of his body, stuck it on the bottom part of his body. That looks like two different pictures put together. Anyway, he's leaning into his hand. He looks sad.
00:19:48
Speaker
Yeah, and I don't have an art history degree. So I have no idea what to make of this. It seems absurd and bizarre to me. But I'm sure do you do you see something deeper in this picture? So I don't see something deeper. But what I believe, I don't know. But what I think this is supposed to represent is, well, it's weird, because usually it's Jesus who's got his two fingers up like that. But I think this might be supposed to be
00:20:10
Speaker
God making woman from Adam's rib. That's why there's so little of her. There's like just an arm and a head, but it's not, it's so weird. And the other thing that's crazy that I noticed is that his belly button is an eye.
00:20:24
Speaker
I don't know what is going on. His hand almost looks like it's melded with his other thigh. It's a very, it's a picture that you- Shit drawing. Yeah. Like you look at it and you want to look away, but you can't look away. Totally. So if this piques your interest listeners, you really should. I mean, I go back, honestly, it's one of the sites that I keep as a like, when I'm in a bad mood, I go back and look at it because there's so much hilarious stuff in there.
00:20:50
Speaker
Okay, so our point being it took a while before artists really started to understand how to draw and paint realistically and that brings us to the Renaissance and an era of Western art that a lot of people are pretty familiar with Da Vinci and
00:21:04
Speaker
his peers went out and I was writing these notes. I had a total brain fart on any Renaissance artist except for Da Vinci. And then my brain was like, just think of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And I could only remember Leonardo, which doesn't help because that's Leonardo Da Vinci. Laurel, can you name all four Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? I used to be able to. I loved that cartoon. I know Donatello is one of them. There you go. Donatello. I think that's all I got. Leonardo. I feel like there's one that starts with a B. There's two more, isn't there?
00:21:34
Speaker
There are definitely some people yelling at us right now over the airwaves. Maybe you can look that up in the background while I keep going. Leonardo Donatello. This was in the Renaissance period an explosion of large muscular men and soft rounded women as an ideal. There was no long and lean here for women, in no small part because being skinny suggested that you were poor and could not afford rich food.
00:22:02
Speaker
and completely related note, it was also important that you were pale, pale, pale. And having any kind of color to your skin suggested that you spent time outside working like a poor. But hang on, did you find all the T.H.B. minister? Yeah, so we forgot Raphael and Michelangelo. Michelangelo! And there's also Splinter, but isn't he a bad guy? He's the bad guy. He's not a turtle. Yeah. Okay. Thank you.
00:22:27
Speaker
Okay, so I always think it's interesting if we flash forward to like the 1980s and the idealized tanned lean woman like Christie Brinkley running on a beach in a bathing suit, which was decidedly not the look for wealthy Renaissance ladies who are the ones having their portraits done and thus the artistic visual ideal. They were like the influencers of the time, if you will. And Petrarch, who was a poet of the time, he was
00:22:52
Speaker
obsessed with this one woman in particular named Laura, and he wrote tons and tons and tons of poems about her. And because his poetry was so widely read, it soon became a Renaissance ideal to look like Laura. And so I got this description from the Metropolitan Museum website, which is, and I quote, the ideal woman had blonde hair, which was often dyed, a high forehead, often created by plucking hairs from the hairline with tweezers, pale skin, and a long neck.
00:23:22
Speaker
I think they also used to paint their skin white. Oh, yes. People in the Renaissance believed that a woman's physical characteristics were a reflection of her beauty on the inside. So if you are beautiful on the outside, that meant you were beautiful on the inside. Well, do you have any thoughts on this contrast between these two ideals and in particular what each societal impact had on women's health?
Evolution of Women's Roles and Body Ideals
00:23:44
Speaker
We may have thought we were prioritizing fitness and exercise in the 80s, but I think in the reality, we cared less about being healthy and more about looking healthy.
00:23:52
Speaker
using whatever means available, diets, drugs, surgery, et cetera. Yeah. It's pretty much the case throughout history that pre-evidence-based modern medicine and now post-evidence-based modern medicine, that if we want to better understand how women are handled by society, we should really look closely at the discrepancy, the difference,
00:24:19
Speaker
between everything we're told to do to appear healthy, which is really just another way of saying appearing fashionable or as a member of mainstream, higher echelon, wealthy society, right? Everything we're told to appear healthy, quote unquote, and then
00:24:44
Speaker
what it is that is actually required to be healthy from an evidence-based standpoint. And it's almost like complete opposites because what's required to look like we're somebody in this world is actually quite a bit of money. And what's required to be healthy is actually a social safety net.
00:25:12
Speaker
These two ideas are at odds with each other because the dollar is king in the United States. We're a capitalist society. We're a deeply hierarchical capitalist society. There are winners and there are losers here.
00:25:30
Speaker
And to be healthy, right, to actually be healthy, what we need is universal health care. We need access to nutrient dense food. We need access to mental health care. We need access to reproductive health care. We need, you know, enough time in our day and to feel safe enough to exercise moderately, right? And, you know, women, especially I think,
00:25:58
Speaker
are kind of scapegoated, right? Where it's like, you can never fucking win. You are never enough, never enough. And that is a feature. It's not a book, right? It's a feature. So it functions to basically feed the capitalist machine that we all operate and breathe inside of.
00:26:21
Speaker
So I think that I could say a lot about this, and I know we both could say a lot about it, but no. What happened in the 80s with the... It was really the early 90s with the obesity epidemic, and then fat phobia has been around for a long, long, long time, but it kind of...
00:26:38
Speaker
collided with the medical system in the early 90s, that we are still deeply confused as a society. I'm not saying that medicine is confused about what it means to be healthy. I think that medicine often does a shit job, but they're operating with a lot of constraints. Medicine operates within this capitalist society, but I think we're doing a pretty shit job of helping people actually be healthy.
00:27:07
Speaker
because it's not as simple as saying change your individual behaviors, right? That's what's tricky about it. And when we focus a lot on how people look, we bring it down to the individual and what we perceive as being under their control and really it's just,
00:27:25
Speaker
It's bullshit. It's bullshit. People can look many different ways and be healthy, and they can look many different ways and be unhealthy. These two things need to be divorced in our mind, basically. Yes. 100%. Snaps, snaps, snaps. So many snaps. Snaps. Okay. I'm going to pull us back to the Renaissance. We are coming back to the 90s and the 80s. Don't worry.
00:27:47
Speaker
But just to continue our timeline, so following the Renaissance, as we scroll through the centuries, women continue to be clothed in corsets. And it's, they're using called waist trainers now that we're going to get into, the draggy nuts. So corsets, layers and layers of dresses with hoops and bumps and all kinds of things that basically cut you from physically moving around much. And you certainly didn't get any pockets.
00:28:14
Speaker
Because women with pockets were dangerous. They could hold things and pass them to each other. So be subservient. Be quiet. Be housebound. Make children. Raise your children. Don't be assertive. Don't be argumentative.
00:28:27
Speaker
those were the qualities that you were supposed to embody in your physical appearance and in your internal self. And we could turn this into a women's studies class as well. We could start talking about the suffragette movement, but we do have other fish to fry here. So moving right along, we are going to fast forward to the 1900s.
00:28:45
Speaker
And we start to spend a little bit more time in this century. So we start to see some trends in body types that are happening now like a decade at a time, like the speed of the trend of the body shape starts to speed up.
00:28:59
Speaker
And I don't think that's unrelated to things like mass production of, like, newspaper material. Like, it was easier to sort of get information to the masses faster. So trends became more kind of, you know, decade by decade. So there was something in the 1910s called the Gibson Girl, named for, of course, man, illustrator, Charles Gibson. She had a cinched in corseted waist and then large breasts and curvy hips. She was kind of like the hourglass figure, right?
00:29:29
Speaker
but quickly followed by the flapper of the 20s and the 30s, which is just straight up and down. No boobs, no hips, just a very boyish figure. The 1940s brought, and I didn't know this, I thought this was fascinating, you know those really potty cone bra, like the torpedo, they were called torpedo bras or bullet bras? I didn't realize, but this is of course influenced by World War II.
00:29:53
Speaker
It looks so fascinating. And then the fifties became the time of Marilyn Monroe and curves for days, but also sort of a smallish waist. But Marilyn Monroe was not tiny, right? She wasn't long and lean. So as far as exercise goes, sort of starting in the fifties, exercise is being promoted to women. And through, we've talked about this before, the Jacquelyn show, it ran from
00:30:17
Speaker
1953 to 1985, and we talked about it in the episode, Pink Dumbbells and the Shrinking Female Body. I just wanted to highlight this super gross quote from the show in which Jacqueline referred to a woman's stomach as their front porch, their hips as their side porch, and their bottom as their back porch. Well, how do you think this type of language impacts how a woman thinks about her body?
00:30:43
Speaker
That's a particularly, uh, hard one to hear. Yeah. You're a house. We're going to put a baby in your oven and that is maybe in the oven. Yeah. So then if we move on to the sixties, that's when Twiggy, the model Twiggy was around. So Twiggy skinny, right? And it coincided with Weight Watchers, which arrived on the scene in the early sixties. And I don't think I need to go into how successful that has been. I looked it up the current annual.
00:31:10
Speaker
annual revenue of Weight Watchers is about a billion dollars. They make a billion dollars a year. So then, as we get into the 70s, then we're starting to get a little bit more of this athletic look, right? The 70s was known for this boom in jogging for exercise or, and I just had to put this in because it makes me laugh, in Ron Burgundy from Anchorman, he says, we're doing this new thing called jogging. Apparently you just run for an extended period of time
00:31:41
Speaker
But it was the 80s that was really known for just an explosion in fitness culture with gyms offering aerobic classes for women, weightlifting for men. We're going to pause and spend a little time sort of here and then going forwards. So if you came online in the 80s, as I did, as you did, Laura, but I'm a little bit older than you, as I believe many of our listeners did, if the phrase I carried a watermelon means anything to you,
00:32:09
Speaker
then the shape that you were told to aspire to was the OG Long and Lean, if you will. The aliens was the era that spawned the supermodels. They're so famous that we knew them by first names only. Cindy, Christie, Linda, Naomi. They were the glamazons. And these were epitomized glamour. And alongside this came things like, you know, aerobics, jazzercise, other workouts for women that would, and I hate this word so much, tone.
00:32:39
Speaker
your body. To this day, classes into women are called things like sculpt and define, right? And it's like this idea that underneath the current level of clay that you are, there's a perfect body and you just need to go to enough Arabic classes and sculpt away that gross excess to reveal the perfect body underneath. Also, you would only ever use the tiny pink dumbbells, two or three pounds at the most, because that's how you tone
00:33:06
Speaker
And then my nose just went fucking hell gah cause I just, I got annoyed at that point. Pink it and shrink it. Pink it and shrink it. That's our friend, Mickey Mob-Levy. What other words are there out there, Laurel, that are aimed at women or in classes for women? Are there any that you hate in particular? I really hate tone. You got a lot of them. Chisel. Shape and tighten.
00:33:34
Speaker
Uh, sometimes more aggressive terms like blast and shred, uh, which just make me, um, go out. Like, no, please don't blast my body. Right. Seriously. But like burn or firm, right? All those jiggly things, too many jiggly things. They need to be firm. Yeah. Um, lift. We're going to lift your bum. Yeah. And lengthen right for long and lean. Right. So.
00:34:02
Speaker
And then we also started to, around this time and into the 90s, started to
00:34:08
Speaker
get into this very nitpicky attitude about women's bodies, this idea that you had problem areas, right? And that you could target them like your core or your butt. According to the US Food and Drug Administration, Americans spent an estimated $30 billion in 1992 on all types of, that's 1992 money, which is, I don't know what the translation is to now money, but it's more.
00:34:34
Speaker
on all types of diet programs and products, diet foods, drinks. I mean, it's fucking exhausting. And I have absolutely participated. I mean, Lauren, did you ever feel pressure to diet or exercise just for reasons of appearance? Oh, my God. Yeah. I mean, I went from exercising really for athletic purposes, just not at all concerned about what I look like because I did ball sports. I wasn't a gymnast or I wasn't a dancer or anything like that, to enrolling in a Bachelor of Fine Arts program as an actor with
00:35:05
Speaker
aspirations to work in a large city, perhaps on camera, perhaps on stage, I didn't know. But even before that, I got messages from all over the places we all did. I mean, come on, it was the 90s, it was the 80s, it was the 90s. It was all about diet culture. From my mom as well, of course, she was also trying to lose weight.
00:35:29
Speaker
I definitely had some problem areas according to me, but it was very confusing to me because I, so one of my problem areas was my butt. I was like, not okay with my butt.
Personal Experiences and Industry Pressures
00:35:41
Speaker
But then I went, and then I went to like college and, and, you know, left the house and went to New York city and like, I got a lot of attention from men about my butt. So I was like, I don't know how to feel about this, right? So I'm objectified for my, my butt.
00:35:58
Speaker
Which is, of course, we could talk about this whole idea of what you mentioned about her front porch and her back porch and a bun in the oven. Women are objectified so that they can be commodified. They're objectified so that they can be made like a possession dehumanized in a way. Again, that's a feature, not a bug of the society that we live in, the deeply hierarchical society where women are not in positions of power typically.
00:36:25
Speaker
although what i will say is that there is a lot of internalized misogyny i don't know if you've noticed this sarah right and i certainly have internalized misogyny i think that most women do because we are of this place right we breathe the air here and so i would say like yes having problem areas as a woman.
00:36:47
Speaker
is a form of, I don't want to call it internalized misogyny necessarily, but the messaging has worked. You have started to think of your body as an object, as something to be shaped like clay for the pleasure of someone else's eyes.
00:37:07
Speaker
Unfortunately, yeah, that's what we're dealing with. And that's why we're doing these episodes, right? Is to kind of peel back the curtain and make some of this less implicit and more explicit in our minds. It's like the matrix, right? We're trying to recognize what is actually being communicated underneath the flippant words that we hear every single day.
00:37:32
Speaker
Yes, 100%. I have a really clear memory of buying laxatives because I remember reading in a magazine or somewhere that it was like if you overate, just buy some laxatives and flush it all out of your body or something. It was like an alternative to being bulimic or something like that.
00:37:53
Speaker
But I don't remember, I think I chickened out of using it, or maybe I tried and it didn't do anything. I don't know what I thought it was going to do, but I remember that was like, ooh, to make me skinnier. From my late teens into my early 20s, I did have a full-on eating disorder. I was anorexic. And I was modeling for a lot of that time. And so the feedback loop that I was in was like, you look great, keep going.
00:38:18
Speaker
Yeah, you look great. Keep going. If I'm doing a good job not eating, watch me not eat even more. Watch this amount of not eating. But luckily for me, I got out of that. You get this type of feedback from people that you know, love you very much, like that are very close to you, parents, siblings, family members, like, you know, I've definitely had
00:38:42
Speaker
Disordered eating I probably don't classify as having an eating disorder But there's been many times in my life where I would lose 5 10 pounds for whatever reason maybe sometimes on accident sometimes on purpose and people would be like wow you look great and some people go further and be like you've lost weight, you know what I mean and and like it's so it's like the attention on my butt it's so confusing you're like Thank you because there's this deep anxiety underneath that
00:39:11
Speaker
Right? There's this feeling of just kind of being a thing that people look at underneath that and this wanting of acceptance for something maybe deeper than that. But hey, I'll take it. If you think I look good, that's good too, right? It's very sad. It's very sad. And it kind of like reminds me again of this question about like, who do you think of when you think of someone that's long and lean and like,
00:39:39
Speaker
I could think of Sarah, but I don't because I know Sarah. I know who she is as a person. I'm unable to dehumanize her to that extent and be like, Sarah is this object that is long and lean. It's like, no, Sarah is Sarah. And I think that ultimately that's what every person wants is to be seen as a person, as a whole person. And I think men and women face this challenge, but women especially are often not seen that way. Yeah.
00:40:07
Speaker
When we were talking about you're getting positive feedback or you're getting feedback from people around you who love you, I just remember my agency, my modeling agents were like, you look great. I was like, this means I'm succeeding. I'm getting positive reinforcement from them. A lot of it was about you don't have a lot of autonomy as a model.
00:40:32
Speaker
you know, for want of a better, you know, you're a clothes hanger with a heartbeat, you know, so I mean, I, there's so many conversations that happened in front of me that were just, you know, horrendous. And I was also, you know, pre 25, my brain was not fully formed. But I remember, I remember on time standing next to another model and the, the, the client was looking at us and they were like, which one has the better legs?
00:40:56
Speaker
And then they picked the other girl because she had the better legs. What's so funny to me is you considering me long and lean because in my head I'm like, no, I'm not. Because it's so internalized from all of that stuff. I'm like, no, I look normal. Long and lean is skinny. Anyway, that's like self-image and all that kind of stuff.
00:41:14
Speaker
And even after the eating disorder part was over, it took a long time for me to stop thinking about controlling my food all the time. I was definitely still very concerned with what I was eating, and I didn't just go like, ooh, I'm fine now.
00:41:29
Speaker
And I think that's the case for a lot of women. Either they don't make it all the way into like fully anorexia, they kind of stay in that like, I'm really thinking about my food a lot more than is healthy. Or if they come out of the anorexia, it's hard to go all the way out and not be thinking about your food in some way.
00:41:46
Speaker
Okay, so I'm gonna bring us back to the timeline. So that supermodel glamazon look of the late 80s was then co-opted by Harrow and Sheik in the early 90s with Kate Moss. This was not a fitness ideal, so much as it was a wasting away ideal. Less long and lean, more starving, drug addict. Thankfully, it was kind of brief, that period, but it kind of coincided with grunge. It coincided with me being in college
00:42:15
Speaker
And it was when I was modeling as well. And I'm six foot tall. K-MOS is five, seven, I think. My bones are physically big. There's no way I was going to look like her, but that's what I was supposed to try to look like, right? We were also seeing a lot more nudity in non-porographic media that was just kind of coming up. And, you know, people were definitely having pearl clutching moments about it, but
00:42:41
Speaker
in the same way that the word bitch used to be like, oh my God, you would never say that. And now people are like, bitch, please. So this was sort of starting to be a normalization of things like the Calvin Klein ads with Kate Moss's perfect round bum. I stared at her butt for so long, wishing my butt looked like that. You go even go to the picture. She has this, it's like, I mean, there's probably some airbrushing or whatever going on, but it's like, it's like the perfect butt. And I was like, well, that's not what mine looks like.
00:43:06
Speaker
Um, I don't know if you remember Madonna put out that sex book, which was just a bunch of pictures of her making various formations and another incredible body. I was raised a very, uh, I, there's probably a lot of things that I didn't see, but, but I, but, but my brother, we did have MTV and I was young when MTV came out and my brothers would turn it on when my parents would leave.
00:43:29
Speaker
And I saw, I saw some things there. I saw some things on MTV, but like, yeah, I was a little bit sheltered. Fair, fair. Um, this was, there was that iconic picture of Demi Moore pregnant, uh, on the cover of Vanity Fair where she's naked. She's got her arm across her breast, so she's got her hand or some cloth on her, uh, the front of her thighs, but like this big naked belt and a gorgeous, right?
00:43:52
Speaker
But this is also the time where, as I said earlier, we're starting to pick apart our bodies. Maybe because we're now seeing more naked bodies sort of as commonplace and around. And now we're starting to examine our bodies in painful detail and giving these so-called problem areas cruel names. Things like cankles, muffin tops, bat wings, or bingo wings. I think bingo wings because it's like grandma's playing bingo.
00:44:21
Speaker
and their arm skin is moving. My very least favorite, Fupa. What's that? Front upper pubic area. Satterbags, which is like your side hips or anything. Laurel, are there other mean ones that you've heard that you're like, ugh. I think you kind of covered the in terms of the ones that I know, maybe double chin. Yeah, I can't think of any more. Yeah. Well, this bishop persists to this day because
00:44:51
Speaker
In 2009, Gold's Gym declared that July was Kanko Awareness Month. And to that I say, go fuck yourselves, Gold Gym. Just go into the comments section of any influencer who is, you know, fat or any influencer who is full body or any influencer who's not stick thin doing some form of exercise. And it is
Impact of Language and Health Tools
00:45:15
Speaker
a cesspool, but a lot of them are so smart because they
00:45:19
Speaker
turn that hateful comment into a post and it gets a lot of play because there are a ton of people who think this shit is awful. There's probably fewer people who are sadistic, cruel,
00:45:37
Speaker
mean people who are trying to hurt others for fun, for sport. But yeah, this is alive and well. This body hatred, fat phobia is rampant on social media. But if you happen to be protected by your algorithm, you might not see it as much. I follow a lot of influencers who are fat, full-bodied,
00:46:04
Speaker
Doing their thing and they raise a lot of awareness about this hate and it's like wow Look look at what these people who are just living their life Have to deal with on the fucking internet every fucking day like how exhausting you know Sarah I know you've been harassed for speaking up about things that have happened to you just by walking around and being a woman and you know, it's it's exhausting it's it's really truly exhausting and Again, it's a feature
00:46:34
Speaker
not a bug, okay, because we live in a deeply hierarchical society where there are people in power who would like to remain there. Thank you very much. I found an article online from 2016 from Harper's Bazaar. It was about like, because I think I googled, what are women's problem areas? And many, many websites came up. And in this article from Harper's Bazaar, they talk about the quote unquote, banana roll.
00:47:03
Speaker
which is the term for the pocket of fat in the fold just beneath your bottom, according to someone named Dr. Wolf.
00:47:11
Speaker
and my brain just fucking exploded. Like, where is the popular fat in the fold just below my bum? Isn't that just my fucking butt? Why my butt has its own butt? And I'm supposed to do something about it because it's a problem? It's just, it's nuts. It's nuts. And it's become so ingrained in so many of us. And this is that internalized thing that you were talking about. It's not exactly internalized misogynistic thinking, but it has been internalized.
00:47:39
Speaker
in women because we are.
00:47:42
Speaker
over and over and over again, pounded with this idea that our bodies are a problem. And we need to cut and divide ourselves up into the okay parts and the not okay parts. And we need to diet and exercise and have surgery because we gotta whittle away anything that we have deemed, society has deemed wrong or ugly or problematic. We are being driven to micromanage every aspect of our parents until we just loathe
00:48:12
Speaker
Every single part of ourselves. Yeah, I mean it is it is a form of hate It's a it's a it's a form of hate expression for me At least I refer to misogyny is when like someone has weaponized their hatred, you know in a way that is going to actually exist
00:48:27
Speaker
cause harm to the person in a public way or a personal way. I think that our insecurities that we might feel inside of ourselves around our problem areas aren't necessarily self-hatred because I'm not going to tell people how they feel about themselves. I don't think of it as self-hatred. I don't think I really hate myself. I don't call it that, but I definitely have anxiety.
00:48:51
Speaker
Right? Like, there's anxiety around it. And I think anxiety is different than hatred. And I think we're dealing with different levels of anxiety internally. And we're also expressing that anxiety outwardly, like when we become hyper focused on what we look like, or when our teaching kind of turns into more of a focus on aesthetics, right? And
00:49:11
Speaker
We kind of play up all this long and lean stuff. I don't think that's necessarily misogynistic. It comes from a misogynistic culture, though. It comes from a culture that has overtly and covertly expressed hatred for women in many different ways, big and small, for the purpose of maintaining the hierarchical order, right? Yeah.
00:49:33
Speaker
And I, I would say, you know, I'm glad that for you and probably for other people, it is more of an anxiety than anything else. But I think there are plenty of people who have had, you know, more than one thought, like, like something like, I hate my thighs. For sure. I hate my butt. I hate my kangles, right? I mean,
00:49:55
Speaker
People say it. I hate my body. I hate the way I look. And yeah, that's for sure the case. I'm sure for many people. We do have to dip a toe into the world of diet drugs. Okay. Because it's part of this story, right? So after World War II, amphetamines
00:50:19
Speaker
I just laugh because it's so bananas. But amphetamines were used as weight loss aids until it was banned in 1979 because they're too addictive. Yeah, new shit. Have you ever heard of speed? Have you ever heard of methamphetamine, also known as crystal meth? I had some ephedrine in college. I would take ephedrine to lose weight. Is that a form of speed?
00:50:43
Speaker
I think I'm not sure, I'm not a pharmacist. It definitely has a speeding up type. It has a speedy quality to it. I remember people used to break open pills. Isn't it supposed to be used like a nasal decongestant? I have no idea. I know that it was given to me. I purchased it as a weight loss aid. It was like, you will lose weight on ephedrine. I think they've since banned it. Probably. Because it's actually quite dangerous.
00:51:10
Speaker
Yeah. Um, and also, uh, Ritalin, which is a drug that people use for ADHD is also an amphetamine. Um, so amphetamines are out there everywhere, but they're no longer, they're not supposed to be used as weight loss aid, but so those were banned. And then there were some other ones that sort of came along in the eighties. Um, but the one that I remember the most from the mid 1990s was Fen Fen. Do you remember Fen Fen? So Fen Fen, uh, it's spelled F-E-N.
00:51:40
Speaker
with a dash P-H-E-N, it was a combination of two anorectics, which are just, the word anorectic just means appetite suppressant. Phenfluorine and phenentramine. Nope. Phentermine.
00:51:56
Speaker
Before, that diet pill combination was also pulled from the market because there were concerns over serious heart valve problems that were happening to people. Whereas looking into the history of diet drugs, there are all kinds of diet drugs that did not make it past the FDA approval system because they caused things like psychiatric problems and strokes and heart attack and sudden death.
00:52:18
Speaker
in the name of losing weight. Because it's a huge industry, right? If you came up with like the next big diet drug, you are a gazillionaire. And at the moment, we're seeing Ozempic.
00:52:28
Speaker
and the other drugs in that family, which is supposed to be for people with type 2 diabetes to help control their blood sugar, but literally people are just using it for weight loss. I have a patient who's been using it for weight loss, was prescribed it for weight loss by their doctor, and they have lost something like 30 pounds in under three months, like what we would consider a crash diet kind of an effect. And I think the deal is they have to stay on this drug
00:52:59
Speaker
because the second they go off at their weight's going to come back, they're not going to have their appetite suppressed anymore. We don't have any long-term information on using
00:53:07
Speaker
these types of drugs, Ozimpic and the other ones in this class. Yeah. I just want to say too, I definitely feel like the jury's out on Ozimpic as a drug that can be used for more than just type 2 diabetes treatment. I've seen from reputable sources that it has been pretty successful in
00:53:29
Speaker
high quality, large data set studies at reducing risks of cardiovascular disease. So it's like anything, it's very complex and it hasn't been tested for very long. And relatively speaking either has the COVID vaccine, which has been one of the biggest successes of the 21st century in my opinion. So I think that the verdict is still out, but yes, for sure.
00:53:58
Speaker
people will always find a way to
00:54:01
Speaker
Take things way too frickin' far. In Los Angeles in particular, it's been the sort of thing where women, but men as well, have been using it for weight loss. So a lot of actors are using it for weight loss to the point where my friend who actually has type 2 diabetes could not get it at their pharmacy. They had to drive to Burbank because they were out of it. Yeah, I know. There was just this craze where there was suddenly this extremely high demand for it for various
00:54:29
Speaker
Uh, and there's no various reasons. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's actually, it's, it's a, it's a pretty, um, it's, it's a breakthrough drug. I mean, it's got, I think it's considered a breakthrough drug and there's, there's a lot of, uh, positive potential there. I think at least from what I've heard from MDs, cardiovascular, uh, MDs, but, uh, yeah, again, it just depends on, um, how it's used, which depends on.
00:54:53
Speaker
the doctor, right, who determines how it will be used, honestly, because that's who decides this is really the doctor and the patient. And it's an individual case by case basis. There are since we're sort of, we took a sidestep into the diet drugs in our timeline, we are still in the 90s. And this is where we start to see this BMI really coming through. Can you start to talk a little bit about BMI, how
00:55:19
Speaker
It's an inherently racist tool and talk about just a little bit, because I know this is going to be coming up a ton in your episode. Kind of like a teaser for our next episode, which is going to be about more than BMI, but BMI.
00:55:31
Speaker
is definitely something that we do talk about because we're going to be talking about the science of being long slash lean, what that actually means from a physiological standpoint in terms of body composition. So yeah, anyway, BMI stands for Body Mass Index. And it is really just a formula that some person named... He's from Belgium.
00:55:56
Speaker
And it was in the early 1800s, Quetzalet or Quetzalet, I'm probably mispronouncing it. He was not interested in weight categories. He wasn't interested in classifying people according to weight categories. He really just wanted to understand average proportions of people. So he created this formula, which is basically it's kilograms in your body weight in kilograms divided by your height in meters squared. And that gives you a number.
00:56:22
Speaker
And so then what happened is sometime I believe in the 50s, a gentleman named Ansel Keys, who was a American physiologist and nutritionist, he took this formula and he decided, you know what, the way that we're classifying weights, which really comes from kind of, it's actually a very interesting history.
00:56:44
Speaker
The way that humans were classified in terms of their body size really came from insurance companies who were trying to reduce risk. So they were measuring their policy holders' heights and weights and then deciding like, okay, who are we going to deny policies to so that we don't have to pay out as much in premiums? But guess who the policy holders were in the early 1900s? Guess who they were? I'm going to guess they were white men.
00:57:12
Speaker
You're right. They were white men. And so we're going to get some skewed data there. But anyway, Ansel Keys is like, listen, I got a much easier way to do this. So he stole Kettlett's formula. I don't know if you gave credit. He might have given credit. And he's like, this is now what we're going to call the body mass index. This is sometime in the 50s anyway. So then we have the obesity epidemic sometime around 1995, where the World Health Organization published a report.
00:57:38
Speaker
on obesity and they used BMI to do it. So they suggested that there are, you know, this is a rough categorization, but there's like basically four weight categories. There's underweight, normal weight, overweight and obese. And then there's grades of obesity. But basically they're using this, this number to put people into categories. Well, there's a big problem with this number. Okay.
00:58:03
Speaker
One problem is that it does not account for lean mass or doesn't differentiate between lean mass and fat mass or fat mass and fat free mass. Okay, so then what you have is you have this incorrect categorization a lot of the times for people who are taller.
00:58:21
Speaker
Okay because people are taller have longer bones right fat is fat right and everything that's not fat is lean mass okay so think like muscle bone blood water your body's mostly water right. Connective tissues neural tissue like all that is is lean mass and then we have.
00:58:40
Speaker
fat mass. They're trying to decide if somebody is overweight, which means that their body composition is such that they have too much fat. The index only tells you what the ratio is between someone's weight and height.
00:58:54
Speaker
it doesn't tell you what proportion of that is lean and not lean mass. And so then what you also have is like, for example, African Americans tend to have higher amounts of muscle and bone than white people, for example. So they're often miscategorized for that reason as well, because this is very simple, overly simple heuristic that's being used to put people into categories. There's problems like this. And basically what it comes down to is that BMI oversimplifies health risks.
00:59:24
Speaker
and because it's too simple
Modern Standards and Influencers
00:59:26
Speaker
of a tool for the job, but it's relied on very heavily by the medical profession still to this day. What it does is that it risks two things. One is it risks racial disparities in health and healthcare. Whole groups of people end up misclassified. And two, it causes stigmatization where people with higher BMI,
00:59:50
Speaker
often, and this is documented, face bias from healthcare professionals. This impacts their healthcare, obviously. It also impacts whether or not they're going to go and seek out healthcare. I was listening to a podcast, someone interviewing Sabrina Strings. I'm going to talk a lot about her book,
01:00:09
Speaker
fearing the black body the racial origins of fat phobia in part two of this series and she recounted an incident where she went to the doctor and She's actually by this index standards normal weight. She was experiencing some health Concerns and the doctor was like you need to lose weight. That was the diagnosis so to speak it was like you're you just need to lose weight and even by the standards of body mass index, which is a
01:00:39
Speaker
dumb, overly simplistic tool that doesn't actually measure what it's supposed to measure, which is it's supposed to measure body composition, but it doesn't. She was basically told to lose weight. She's given no answers as to what is happening in her body. She is by this BMI standard normal weight. So where did that come from?
01:01:02
Speaker
She's black, right? Why did the doctor look at her and go, you know what your problem is, is you just need to lose weight, right? So this is really what she unpacked. She's a sociology scholar and has contributed a lot to this discussion around BMI as well as the racial origins of fat phobia. This is what she unpacks to a large extent in her book that you, I know you read as well.
01:01:24
Speaker
And so just to have that on your radar, because this is where we have this colliding of worlds, which is the worlds of aesthetics and basically aesthetic ideals held up as a tool for control and health.
01:01:43
Speaker
Where these two worlds collide and we go you know what is healthy is not having fat on your body when in fact we're confused a lot of the times not always and
01:01:58
Speaker
And when I say we, I mean the general population. I'm not necessarily talking about doctors being confused, although there is well-documented fat phobia in medicine. Absolutely. But I'm mostly speaking about the way society treats fat and how this all ties into our topic today, which is how movement teachers talk about students' bodies and how they place value on the
01:02:24
Speaker
certain types of appearances with language like long and lean. That's why we're doing these episodes. I'm excited to hear more about all of this for your part two of this series. I'm excited to get into that recording. We start to see, I'm going back to our timeline. Now we're entering the early 2000s. We start to see a little bit of pushback against this idealized female figure.
01:02:52
Speaker
Not a lot, not much. I remember, and I had to look up when it happened, it was in 2003, Kate Winslet called out GQ magazine because they put her on the cover and they photoshopped her legs. And she like immediately posted a picture of herself and her actual legs and was like, I don't look like that and I don't want to look like that. And I think that was, that was the first time I remember a celebrity
01:03:18
Speaker
calling out the Photoshop as opposed to being like, oh, thank God, they made my legs look better or something like that, right?
01:03:25
Speaker
And then, you know, get ready, because here come the Kardashians. And the beginning of what I, I don't know if this has a name, but it's sort of plastic surgery as an aesthetic, right? So, I mean, plastic surgery has been around for a while, but things like the Brazilian butt lift and all of these things where we're, you know, literally using knives to carve our bodies. And also something that I referred to earlier in the episode, which is this
01:03:50
Speaker
thing called a waste trainer. Do you know about the waste trainer or is this some LA bullshit? It's some LA bullshit. I'm imagining, is it like Spanx? Well, it's a corset is exactly what it is. You put it on and you squeeze it in and then you go for your hike or something.
01:04:11
Speaker
The name implies what it's supposed to do. It's supposed to train your waist. And I'm like, all that's training is that when you take it off, your guts are going to be like, oh, thank God. Can I just be more comfortable? There's nothing about that that is training a shape in your body.
01:04:28
Speaker
I got to this point. It's the human body as modeling clay. When can we let it go? The body is not moldable that way. Not like that. But you see it constantly, this model of the body.
01:04:44
Speaker
everywhere. And when I was making my notes for this episode and I got to like this sort of modern day part of the timeline, I don't know if you saw it and started laughing, but I started, every single note started with fucking. So it was like fucking waste trainers. I did, I did. And it was like fucking goop. And I'm going to say this, I could spend so many hours ranting about goop, but I won't. But there is that much rant in me.
01:05:12
Speaker
And I'm gonna say this, I'm just gonna say this. I'm gonna say this extra loud for anyone listening who may have fallen under the influence of Gwyneth Paltrow and her goop. IVs are for people who cannot eat or drink using their mouths. If you can use your mouth for eating and drinking, you do not need an IV. Everybody else who's using it is giving themselves expensive pee, a severe eating disorder, or both.
01:05:44
Speaker
rant over. I just I start to get like the red mist across my vision when I think about goop too much. So let's pivot. Let's pivot to fitness and health influencers and I would include yoga and Pilates influencers in this category as well. Now, part three of this series
01:06:02
Speaker
is going to be a deep dive into the Pilates and yoga influence on this long and lean phrase. But for today, I want to focus on the particular kind of trait that we see many of these, you know, quote unquote, well being influencers in the way that they post on social media. And so the post looks something like this, you'll see a text or a caption about like self love or self acceptance and
01:06:30
Speaker
You're exactly where you're supposed to be, or some other sort of, you know, pap for the masses. And it's over an image of a young, white, thin, those are all, those categories all have to be present. Young, white, thin woman, possibly, you know, performing some sort of like asana on the beach.
01:06:49
Speaker
or holding a flower and smiling. So the message is, you're exactly where you're supposed to be, unless it doesn't look like young and white and thin and flexible, in which case you should feel bad. And these kinds of posts, they're not hard to find. They are everywhere. And they're a particularly insidious form of marketing, because typically the influencer is being paid to sell
01:07:10
Speaker
or is trying to get you to take their class or buy their online course, right? If you ever see me and Laurel in a real pose on the beach with a sunset happening underneath our perfect poses and the caption, all beauty is on the inside, you have my permission to troll us both. Can we do a parody of that the next time we go to Yalapa? Yes, please. Yes, please.
01:07:34
Speaker
thought terminating cliches. It's usually a video with a thought terminating cliche over a white skinny lady doing yoga. Yeah. And nowadays, I mean, we're now dealing with AI in social media and images, which is sort of like, it's kind of a bigger slash possibly scarier version of Photoshop because
01:07:57
Speaker
You know, the short version is you should never believe any image you're seeing because at best it's, you know, airbrushed and photoshopped. And at worst, it doesn't even exist in real life and has been created by AI. So it's an idea that doesn't even exist. And this is a quote from Tina Fey's book, Bossy Pants. She says, now every girl is expected to have Caucasian blue eyes, full Spanish lips, a classic button nose, hairless Asian skin with a California tan,
01:08:26
Speaker
a Jamaican dance hall ass, long Swedish legs, small Japanese feet, the abs of a lesbian gym owner, hips of a nine-year-old boy, the arms of Michelle Obama, and doll tits. It's true. Oh my God. And Lola, this sort of made me think and thank you for being willing to talk about this because I think, you know,
01:08:51
Speaker
as mom to a daughter who is inevitably going to be exposed to all of this kind of stuff. Do you and Nathan discuss how you're going to address it? Is that something you're thinking about yet? Yeah. And Nathan is very, very diligent as her father about almost never
01:09:11
Speaker
Like, I mean, he's opposed to it, commenting on how pretty she looks, how beautiful she is, right? It's always about like, you're tough, you're strong, you're smart.
01:09:28
Speaker
You work hard. It's a lot about working hard, right? And I'm a little bit less good about it because I just kind of just, she's like the most beautiful person in the world to me, right? So sometimes I'm just like, you are just so beautiful, Elia. It just kind of like, oh, it just comes out of me. But I think that it comes down to really at her age, she's five.
01:09:53
Speaker
very carefully deciding on what you're going to highlight and reflect back to her about herself. And I would say we both do a really good job, but Nathan does an exceptional job at really talking about the work ethic, the grit, the toughness, the stick-to-itiveness, and then playing up the things that we really admire about her, which is that she's creative and smart and
01:10:18
Speaker
She's a fun person to be around, you know what I mean? Like all that positive feedback and that, you know, some critical feedback as well. Like, you know, you need to say you're sorry and let's clean up your mess. But I think that right now our approach is really to choose what we give energy to. Yeah. Yeah. And I was thinking about this and even, you know, there's a difference between, let's say,
01:10:47
Speaker
your daughter at some point came to you and was like, I think this part of my body is ugly or something. There's a difference between responding to that with something like, but you're beautiful just as you are, as opposed to taking a step back and thinking, why are we emphasizing appearance for women?
01:11:06
Speaker
this much, right? Why is that basically almost 100% of the emphasis on what matters as a woman, right? And that's also to me similar to, you know, and you and I have talked about how within the weightlifting world, a lot of women are afraid to start to lift heavy because they're afraid they're going to get bulky.
01:11:28
Speaker
And you know, bulky, again, it's the opposite, obviously, of this idealized long lean. So we've talked about how how much work it actually is for a lot of people to become
01:11:37
Speaker
you know, quote unquote bulky, right? It's not just lifting some weights a few times a week, but the step beyond that, again, similarly to, you know, not just saying, well, you're beautiful as you are, we need to, to stop demonizing bulky. We have to start making, stop making bulky a dirty word because it's, it's, it's only that is, that is that internalized, uh, image that we have of ourselves as
01:12:02
Speaker
I need to be not bulky and the full version of that sentence is I need to be not bulky because men don't like it. So we need to stop thinking about bulky as a bad thing. Whether or not each individual person's bodies will be able to do it or not. I like the analogy of being afraid to get bulky from lifting weights a couple of times a week is sort of like being afraid of driving your car because you don't want to be a NASCAR.
01:12:32
Speaker
driver. It's so far away from what's probably going to happen because you have to work really, really, really hard to bulk up, especially as a woman. And then at the same time, it's also like, well, wouldn't you like to be an NASCAR driver? Wouldn't you like to be so good at driving a car that you are a race car driver? Also, wouldn't you like to be strong? Because there's a very strong relationship between muscle mass and longevity.
01:13:00
Speaker
and muscle mass and health and muscle mass and the prevention of chronic degenerative disease. I don't know. It doesn't make sense, but you know what? That is also a feature and not a bug. Exactly. We're close to the end of this episode and I got to this point when I was writing it and I was like,
01:13:28
Speaker
I don't want to just be like, okay, bye now, everything sucks. It made me sad and it kind of put me in a crappy mood. And that's not how I want to leave you guys. So I started thinking about some badass women that broke the mold for a variety of reasons that had nothing to do with physical fitness, not physical appearance.
01:13:55
Speaker
And there were a couple that for me immediately came to mind. One was, and I didn't realize, I thought this was later than this. In 1967, Catherine Switzer was the first woman to ever run the Boston Marathon. And there's this famous picture of like the men running the race, literally trying to drag her off the race course. And in my mind, I'm just like, yeah, she's faster than you, ding dong. She's fucking trained for a marathon. You think you're gonna be able to like run fast enough and catch up to her?
01:14:25
Speaker
But that was a real game changer because women were not permitted prior to that. Like she entered the race, she entered a men's race as a woman. There was no woman's race. And then the other one, and they just did make a, I think it's a movie or a series about this, Diane Nyatt in 2013 at age 64 managed to finally compete a swim from Cuba to Key West without a shark cage. It was her fifth attempt.
01:14:52
Speaker
The part that sticks out for me is without a shark cage because that would be the part where I'd be like, oh, this is shark infested waters? No, I'm okay. I think I'll stick with swimming pools that don't have sharks in them. Age 64, so not in the peak of our lifetime's health, but just trained the shit out of it, was determined and did it.
01:15:17
Speaker
And I just think that's kind of amazing. And I haven't watched that show or movie yet, but I definitely want to. It's got Annette Benning and Jodie Foster. It's supposed to be really good. Do you have any examples like that? Are there any women that you kind of just love how their story breaks the mold? Yeah. And I actually want to link some in the show notes, if that's okay. Please. I love following Latoya Shante Snell. She is a self-described black fat ultra marathoner.
01:15:46
Speaker
Her feed is fire. Her handle is I am El Shante. She is incredible. We love our friend of the pod, Raz the Diva. Yes. I also really love, you also follow this person, the handle is at fat body Pilates. She posts really useful Pilates content.
01:16:16
Speaker
really creative stuff. Those are three people that I follow on Instagram. I follow a bunch more as well. So maybe I'll link them and a couple more in the show notes so that folks can get under the influence of these influencers.
01:16:38
Speaker
And another thing I'm going to say about Instagram is that
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
01:16:42
Speaker
if you're following influencers that are using language like tone, sculpt, long and lean, shred, burn, rip, and things like that, and you get a little twitchy about it, it's just unfollow. Get that off your feed and shape your algorithm so that it feeds you the messaging that
01:17:07
Speaker
Helps you feel better about yourself in the world honestly because following these three accounts that i just named makes me feel better about the world right because it shows me that actually we did that things can be more inclusive than it seems like they are.
01:17:24
Speaker
And it's deeply inspirational that despite the negativity that these folks face online, that I know they face online, they just keep kicking ass. They just fucking keep kicking ass. And they're super inspiring for that reason as well. Awesome. Okay. Well, in conclusion, everyone, I hope you enjoyed this episode and are really doubling down on getting that long and lean body. No, I'm just kidding.
01:17:52
Speaker
You can check out our show notes for links to the references that we mentioned in this episode. And finally, it helps us out really so much. If you like our stuff, if you like this, if you're into this, please subscribe. And if you're already subscribed in, I was like, how do you say subscribe as a verb? Subscribe didn't? If you have already subscribed, please rate and review it on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.
01:18:19
Speaker
Get on our wait list for the 2024 cohort of our bone density program, Lift for Longevity. Should we try these and see which one of these we like? Sure. Okay. Hold on. Let me see what we're saying. Oh. See you in two weeks from now. That feels too wordy. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's try that out this one. Okay. See you in a fortnight. That's just for the English listeners.
01:18:49
Speaker
Yeah, but it also reminds me of the video game, my brother and son. Oh, yeah. Okay. Let's try the last one. Okay. See you the week after next. That one was oddly charming. I like that last one. All right. Well, listeners, we'll see you the week after next.