· CHAPTER 1 ·

DROP THE GUILT AND GET YOUR HOT ABS — EVEN IF YOU HAVE A WOMEN’S STUDIES DEGREE

ONCE UPON A TIME I WAS A FAT ACTIVIST. WHICH IS NOT AN activist who happens to be chubby (although I was that too). A Fat Activist is someone who advocates to change anti-fat attitudes in society. And now I’m a fitness expert who is writing a book about how to lose your fat.

I’m telling you this story because I want to invite you to drop any first-world guilt you might have about wanting to lose your muffin top—and give you total permission to go and be the MILFiest MOFO you want to be.

My activist journey started in 1998, when I was front-row center in my Women’s Studies 101 class. Doc boots were ON. The prof put up a projection of this ad from the Body Shop that had a graphic of a chubby Barbie doll with the caption: There are three billion women who don’t look like supermodels and only eight who do.

It’s the kind of thing that people would share on Facebook today and everyone would heart the shit out of it.

The prof asked for our reactions to the ad and you might be surprised to hear we tore it to shreds, but it was a Women’s Studies class; that is what you do. The prevailing objection to the ad was that the Body Shop was supposedly promoting self-love while profiting from our insecurities by selling us products. If we didn’t all want to look like supermodels, then why would we want to buy your peppermint foot cream? This led to a discussion of how The Man is keeping us enslaved by perpetuating such a narrow definition of beauty that we spend most of our lives being distracted by chasing that ideal instead of smashing the patriarchy.

Fast-forward a couple of years and I became a full-on Fat Activist while on tour with a musical theater company. For a year I traveled with a cast of about one hundred singers and dancers in what was basically a petri dish for eating disorders. For example, people would get a part in the show on the condition that they lose a certain amount of weight before the tour started. When we showed up for duty, we were all warned that if we gained weight during the tour, we might lose our role because “you will no longer fit into the costume.” To make matters ickier, during the show, management would have chubby people with beautiful voices singing backstage while thin people lip-synced into dead mics onstage. Not only that—we were given no control over our food choices during the tour, which was provided by the company. Cue bulimia epidemic, stage right.

Fresh from my Women’s Studies days at university, a few renegade castmates and I staged a revolt. We advocated for “body-blind” casting and wrote letters to the management to insist they rewrite their policies. Within our cast, we attempted to neutralize the word fat as a body tissue, not a pejorative. We talked about how obesity is socially constructed and not a personal failing of character or commitment to one’s health. We taught that big can be beautiful and that people with lots of body fat are not automatically unattractive, lazy, or unhealthy.

And I still believe all these things. With all my heart. I never assume that a person with extra body fat wants to lose weight. I never assume that someone eating a Big Mac combo doesn’t know what they’re doing. I never compliment someone on having lost weight like that’s invariably a good thing.

This is where my mindset was at when I started my fitness company, a company that came as a bit of a surprise. I had started teaching exercise classes after my tour because it was enough like musical theater to satisfy my needs: colorful spandex costumes, cheesy music, everyone looking at me—so it met many of my late-twenties essential job criteria. Even though I felt like a little bit of a fitness impostor (it’s possible I might have had a smoke on my way home from class once or twice during those early transition years), teaching exercise classes helped pay the bills while I wrote and produced documentary plays that were supposed to change the world. After some minor theatrical successes, I had a sudden epiphany that I actually liked teaching my fitness classes more than my theater stuff. A bunch of my clients gathered together and asked me to start a boot camp, and that’s how I found myself one day standing in a park at 6:00 a.m. with a bullhorn wearing a T-shirt with my new company name on the back.

But you see, mine was a different kind of fitness company! I called it Fit Feels Good, and we were all about feeling good! We never talked about weight loss! We never posted before-and-after pictures or talked about getting your body ready for summer. But in doing all of this, I was completely ignoring a major reason why my clients were hiring me. The truth was that most of my clients wanted to lose weight. As I type these words, more than half of American women are trying to lose weight. And in my insistence on a “feel good,” health-oriented-only narrative, I was effectively silencing them. And I was judging their deepest desires. And I didn’t even realize it.

Then I met the Orange People and I changed my mind. You know who I’m talking about. Those people who do bikini or bodybuilding competitions. They live in the grunting section of the gym, get an orange tan, and then flex onstage in a crystal bikini with a blinding, neon smile and a butt harder than marble? The Orange People were those for whom I would have reserved my snottiest eye rolls during my fat activism days. As such, they were not people I would have met through my social scene. But at this point in my fitness career, I was training and certifying new personal trainers, many of whom were bodybuilders who wanted to pass on their knowledge. And guess what? Umm…they were really knowledgeable.

Sculpting a specific kind of physique and timing it to be in peak aesthetic shape on a specific day takes some serious scientific chops. It also takes a hell of a lot of work. My (admittedly lovely) bodybuilding students would proudly show me their competition photos and I would gasp at the extent of their transformation. (Because, let me be totally clear: They never looked like that in person. That fitness-magazine-cover glory is a one-day event. Totally impossible to sustain. But I’ll pass on some useful information from the Orange People in later chapters because it’s crazy interesting stuff.) And so I grudgingly started leaking some admiration toward those Orange People.

And then I began to wonder why their event, the one they trained so diligently for, was any different from any other peak athletic event that we all generally accept as a worthy pursuit. Was it really so much more admirable to run a marathon than to compete in a bikini show? Both require extremely hard training and self-discipline. Neither activity particularly benefits society. Okay, sure, maybe you collected a couple of bucks for the charity run, but let’s be honest, that was a bit of an afterthought. I think we can all agree that most people are doing it for themselves and for the sense of accomplishment it provides them.

Which is fucking GREAT.

Can you imagine what would happen if more women just did shit for themselves and for the sense of accomplishment? I don’t care what it is. Walk the West Coast Trail. Drop ten pounds and fit into a size 6. If you’re squashing those aspirations because you think they’re shallow or selfish, you’re doing yourself—and society—a huge disservice. And women do squash their aspirations. All the time. Let’s take a look at a typical conversation between two women, one of whom wants to lose weight:

Jen: “I’m on a diet! I want to lose ten pounds so I can look like a smokin’-hot MILF at my son’s bar mitzvah next month!”

Michelle: “What? That’s ridiculous! You don’t need to go on a diet! You’re perfectly fine the way you are!”

At a glance, this looks like a perfectly acceptable exchange. Jen’s ambition isn’t particularly noble or anything. She doesn’t need to lose weight for her health. She just wants to look hot. And Michelle is just being a good friend by telling her that she doesn’t have to change a thing. My problem with it is that Michelle is (a) stating her opinion about Jen’s body, which is kind of irrelevant, and (b) squashing Jen’s ambition.

Imagine if we played that game with women who want to make more money.

Jen: “I’m starting a side business! I want to make $100,000 a year so I can treat myself to sweet-ass vacations!”

Michelle: “What? That’s ridiculous! You don’t need a side business! You have a totally average income and your vacations are fine the way they are!”

Obviously that would be a total bullshit response that completely disrespects Jen’s ambition and her right to say what she wants for her own fucking vacations.

To expand on the income analogy: I’m not saying that everyone needs a high income. Just like I’m not saying that everyone needs a magazine-cover body. It is perfectly possible to be happy with an average income, and obviously money isn’t everything. It is also perfectly possible to be happy with an average body, and looks aren’t everything. But if you want to make a gazillion dollars and have Tina Turner’s legs, then You. Fucking. Go. Girl. Don’t let anyone squash your ambition and mansplain to you that “you need to love yourself the way you are.”

There’s nothing self-loving about resigning yourself to a body that you aren’t proud of, that doesn’t feel good, that doesn’t reflect who you want to be in the world. There’s nothing shallow or selfish about wanting to be the absolute best version of yourself, whatever YOU decide that is. In fact, it’s the greatest gift you can give to the world. And yet, the idea persists that getting rid of your muffin top is a shallow or selfish pursuit, and that taking care of everybody else first is what makes a woman noble.

Right now my primary mission is running my online transformation program. And I can’t tell you how often I’m asked this question when someone is thinking of joining: “Will my family like this food?” Not “Will I like this food?” Not “Will these foods help me feel good from the inside out?”

The irony here is that taking care of yourself, focusing on your dreams, your health, and your ambitions actually does end up being good for the whole family. Because when Mom gets fit, the whole family gets fit. When Mom gets healthy, she’s modeling healthy habits for everyone. And when Mom is happy and feels confident in her own skin, she radiates. And the whole world benefits.

Here’s the truth: People register for my online program in order to lose weight. And they do, don’t get me wrong: twelve pounds on average. But then guess what happens when those women find themselves residing in a body that feels good to them? When they’ve built the confidence that comes with setting a hard goal and doing the work to achieve it? Guess what happens when they create solid habits that eliminate the need to spend precious brain bytes counting calories and carbs?

A lot of stuff happens.

When Denise finally dropped below the two-hundred-pound mark after years of struggle, she realized that it’s possible to change her life in any way she wanted, and she decided to start an online business. Michelle got the confidence to start dating again. Diane lost thirty pounds, got off her diabetes medication, and felt amazing when walking the red carpet at her play’s Broadway opening. Lisa lost only ten pounds before she got the courage to quit her shit job and move to her dream cabin in the mountains. Wanting to get leaner, stronger, sexy AF isn’t the patriarchy getting you down. Feeling shitty about your body is the patriarchy getting you down.

This is your life. So don’t you dare feel guilty or shallow or unfeminist about wanting to lose your muffin top or sculpting your Kardashian butt or whatever you want to do with your own damn body.

The ultimate act of defiance is to love your body right now exactly as it is and then shoot for the stars to make it the most badass Temple of Awesome that you choose it to be. If that means a six-minute mile, great. If that means six-pack abs, great. If that means being a bit orange and turning sideways while flexing, great. Our job as woke women is to accept every body exactly as it is without judgment (including our own) and to cheer on anyone who is working to improve themselves—whatever that means for them.