The Unapologetic Fat Girl's Guide to Exercise and Other Incendiary Acts - Softcover

Blank, Hanne

 
9781607742869: The Unapologetic Fat Girl's Guide to Exercise and Other Incendiary Acts
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1607742861 ISBN 13: 9781607742869
Verlag: Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

This empowering exercise guide is big on attitude, giving plus-size women the motivation and information they need to move their bodies and improve their health.

Hanne Blank, proud fat girl and personal trainer, understands the physical and emotional roadblocks that overweight women face in the word of exercise. In this one-of-a-kind guide that combines exercise advice with a refusal to fat-bash, Hanne shows readers how to choose workout options from WiiFit to extreme sports, avoid common sports injuries, get proper nutrition, source plus-size work out gear, and more.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

HANNE BLANK is a lifelong fat girl and movement coach who has a devoted (but not monogamous) relationship with her elliptical machine. A writer and historian, she is the author of six books including Big Big Love: A Sex and Relationships Guide for People of Size (and Those Who Love Them) and has taught at Brandeis and Tufts universities. She divides her time between north central Massachusetts and Atlanta, Georgia.

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Introduction:
Excuse Me—I Think This Is Yours
     I want to get one thing straight right from the start: I am not a natural-born jock. I am about as intrinsically athletic as an oyster, with the innate grace and sporty prowess of a brick—a very cute oyster and a very intelligent brick, if I do say so myself, but oysterly and bricklike nevertheless.
     Nor do I count a boundless and cheerful appetite for physical activity among my virtues. I will admit that I have grown to appreciate movement and exercise very much, and often now I even enjoy them. But I am bookish and brainy by nature, which, combined with my lack of organic athleticism and physical talents, has made me a lifelong fan of sitting on my abundant and resilient tuchis, doing things like, oh, say, writing books. Also I am, quite frankly, not terribly fond of sweating. Much as I might wish it were otherwise, I could count on my fingers the mornings on which I have woken up thinking how much I was looking forward to going on that long brisk walk or that invigorating stint at the gym, and I might not even have to use both hands.
     I want to begin this book by telling you this because I need you to know that I am so very not the kind of girl anyone would’ve voted “Most Likely to Write an Exercise Guide” in the high school yearbook. I am, and have always been, pretty geeky. I live, and have always lived, in my head a lot. I have always been, and most definitely still am, a bit of a klutz. And, although I have been a number of different sizes of fat in my time, I am also a lifelong fat girl.
     By this I don’t mean pudgy or a little thickwaisted or “someone who could stand to lose a few pounds.” I mean actually, honest-to-God, Lane Bryant-shoppin’, belly-and-butt-shots-on-the-TV-news-resemblin’, nasty-comments-from-random-strangers-gettin’, fat. In my adult life, I have never weighed less than two hundred pounds. I have often weighed quite a lot more. The phrase “morbidly obese” was first used about me, in my presence, when I was still in grammar school, and despite the frequency with which I have been described—if you’ll excuse my translating the phrase slightly inaccurately—as “sick fat,” I continue existing, healthily, and fatly.
     I also exercise a lot. You heard me right. I exercise. Frequently. Five or six days a week, most weeks. Sometimes seven. Once a day. Or sometimes twice. Occasionally three times, but I reserve that sort of silliness for weekends and vacations, because who has time to go swimming and for a nice long walk and ride bikes during the workweek? Sometimes I exercise energetically, sometimes lackadaisically, sometimes joyously, sometimes meditatively, and sometimes with a virtuosic and well-honed grumpiness that puts even my eighteen-year-old cat to shame. (Some days I manage all of these emotional states in a single gym session. It’s very The Many Moods of Me Moving My Big Ol’ Carcass around here sometimes.)
     The point is, I exercise—not, as I think I have made pretty clear, because I’m one of those folks who by gosh, just lives to exercise. Nor do I think that exercising makes me or anyone any sort of model citizen or moral paragon: to me morality has more to do with how one treats other people.

I exercise because I think it’s important. Rather, I know it’s important.

     It may be that exercise is somewhat more important for me than it might be for some other people. My particular body has a very specific and dramatic relationship to exercise. For me, finding out firsthand just how profoundly regular exercise affected my body’s ability to use its own insulin convinced me that exercise was more than just Something You’re Supposed to Do; it was quite literally powerful medicine. Also there are a number of other ways that exercising regularly improves my physical and mental health. And I have noticed that this seems to be true for many other people as well. It’s been very illuminating to observe what happens for friends and loved ones when they do and don’t exercise regularly: the seasonal depression that responds as much to walking to work as it does to the big expensive full-spectrum light box, the angina that only acts up when someone’s been too busy to get to karate class, the edema in the legs that gets so much better after a trip to the pool. It doesn’t seem to matter what size someone is. The beneficial side effects movement has on the body’s ability to maintain a healthy physical equilibrium appear to be among the few things in this world that seem genuinely to be one-size-fits-all.
     But the whole “exercise is good for your health” thing isn’t what I find most important about exercise. It’s not even the most compelling, in the long run. Exercise, after all, doesn’t make you immortal or even bulletproof. There are plenty of health conditions that exercise can’t and won’t change. You have no idea how much I wish exercise could rid me of my allergy to dairy products, for example, but I could run and lift weights and do sit-ups from sunup to sundown and the math would still look like me + mac and cheese = Technicolor Yawn. Nor does exercise permanently solve my body’s ongoing and entrenched tendency to refuse to use its own perfectly good insulin. If I stop exercising regularly, my body turns up its metabolic nose like a thirteen-year-old girl with a grudge at the insulin it produces.
     Exercise is not a panacea and it is not a magic wand. There are lots of ways our bodies can break that exercise can’t fix. There are lots of ways our bodies can be dysfunctional that exercise can’t even help. Human beings are fragile and complicated, and how or whether we move ourselves around is just one part of the picture. And yet, it is my considered stance that exercise is crucially important. Even if you’re fat. No, strike that—what I should’ve said is that exercise is crucially important, especially if you’re fat.
     Exercise is not important because it’ll make you thin (it won’t necessarily do anything of the kind) or because it’ll give you perfect and enduring health (it won’t necessarily do that either). But, as I discovered more or less by accident in the course of exercising as medical therapy, exercise does something else that is, in its way, more remarkable. Exercise—by which I mean regular physical movement that puts your body through its paces—is crucially important because it is something that makes it possible for you and your body to coexist in better and more integrated ways. It builds a bridge across the mind-body split. Moving your body, regularly and with intent, makes you secure in your own body in a way that no amount of above-the-neck effort can duplicate. Being secure in your body, my friends, is a thing that is relevant to the interests of pretty much every fat girl I have ever known (and a great many other people, too).
     I know, I know: right now, some of you may be thinking I sound a little deranged. You may be wondering if I’ve been sucked into some nutty elliptical trainer cult or something. Believe me when I say that sometimes these kinds of sentiments come out of my mouth, and I give myself the “who are you and what have you done with Hanne?” stinkeye. I never expected to find myself an exercise evangelist. Hell, I never expected to find myself being even so much as an exercise apologist. But then again, I never expected to find myself experiencing exercise as a source of...

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Verlag
Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed
Erscheinungsdatum
2012
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1607742861
ISBN 13 
9781607742869
Einband
Taschenbuch
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
224
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
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