Looking Like a Bodybuilder Doesn’t Mean That You’re in Good Health
It's time to re-evaluate our definitions of "healthy"
This is the first instalment of my article/podcast series titled “10 things I learned in the last 10 years of my health journey that will probably ruffle some feathers.” The goal of the series is to challenge preconceived notions in the health world and share learnings from the past 10 years of my immersion in the wellness world that you will not see talked about anywhere else. Listen to the podcast episodes one and two from this series here.
I specifically decided to speak on topics that I did not see mentioned anywhere (or anywhere near enough) during my time in the health world, with insights that I wish someone would have shared with me 10 years prior to save me a lot of disappointment, setbacks and suffering.
As the title says, this one focuses on a phenomenon that I still see far too often, which is judging someone’s state of physical & mental health and their knowledge of health and nutrition by how close their body resembles the fitness ideal that we have been sold by magazines, TV and social media alike. Because, as I’ve come to learn, just because someone is lean and muscular doesn’t mean that they are healthy. More likely than not, they are probably sabotaging their health, sometimes to a seriously dangerous extent, just to maintain their physiques.
I also want to mention that this article is written from the perspective of someone (me) who has been resistance training for close to a decade now, and not by someone who has never stepped foot in the gym.
This article will cover topics such as:
Disordered eating, body dysmorphia and predatory marketing
Why do so many bodybuilders die young?
Why maintaining muscle mass into old age has more to do with hormonal health than with how much we kill ourselves in the gym
The blatant lies about steroids, stimulants and SARMs use.
How our ideas about what a healthy body looks like have been completely distorted by predatory marketing