(Note here, as elsewhere, for discussions and visuals of genocide, body shaming, eating disorders, thin bodies, etc.)

“When you only have a couple water gallons to train with and your diet is so bad, even calling it suboptimal is a compliment…”

Like any autistic person, I track lifts and nutrition in spreadsheets. July and August have been months from hell. As I’ve been stabilising in the months since, I have been in what I call the “pre-workout” stage of change: not chugging endless amounts of caffeine, no, but intending and failing for many days to get some movement in.

All this internal drama suddenly felt patently absurd after the algorithm gods deigned to show me Jeff Nippard’s¹ interview with Mohd. Hatem, aka @gym_rat_in_gaza.

The conversation itself is pretty nerdy, swinging as it does between physiology and famine. They talk about rep schemes, training volume, what it’s like to train smart. He has water jugs and lentils, and on a good day hits 25g of protein.

And Jeff’s calm pragmatism is weirdly comforting, too: he’s obviously not there, can’t imagine what it’s like to be trying to train under siege while airstrikes and bombs are going off around you. But Hatem sees him as an authority, a coach, “someone that knows a lot more than me, to say the least, the one and only“. Jeff’s stance comes across as a way to remind Hatem: yes, you’re still an athlete, even when everything outside is broken.

When I’m not gobsmacked by it I hear a kind of stubborn creativity in this video: the refusal to stop tinkering, to stop caring about the body as a site of strength and learning.

Even after the so-called ceasefire, I don’t want to romanticize this video. The call doesn’t “inspire” me to “work harder” or “stop making excuses.”

And: The conversation does unsettle me. It does remind me that getting to train is a gift. That when I do get to lift heavy and have access to cheap protein, time to rest,

The conversation presses a deeper question: who gets to be into fitness? We usually picture the affluent lifter, the glossy influencer, the twiggy runner in branded leggings. We don’t picture the man training his chest with water jugs while bombs fall.

And yet here he is, reminding me that fitness is less about what’s optimal and more about what persists. A practice of attunement.

That contrasts sharply with how most of us understand fitness. We’re sold a story, aspiration tethered to control, promising that if you buy in, submit to the right disciplines, and obey the correct protocols, you too can achieve the "after" body.

And it also actively reproduces narrow gender scripts that trap humans in predetermined binary roles. Though this is slowly changing, on the whole “women” must still be slim and "toned" (never too muscular). The ideal woman’s body is eternally contradictory: strong but not threatening, muscular but still conventionally feminine, disciplined but not obsessive. And always, always, always, chasing “weight loss”.

It may be more straightforward for men but, I’d suggest, similarly pressure-filled. “After all, why should they restrict themselves to female markets if they can convince men that their looks need constant improvement too?” wrote philosopher and cultural critic Susan Bordo wrote in 1990 about the consumerist production of male bodily anxiety. “The management and enhancement of the body is a gold mine for consumerism, and one whose treasures are inexhaustible, as women know.” And so men, too, are drawn into this cycle — “bigorexia,” the sense that no matter how large the muscles, they aren’t large enough. The control and management of the body becomes a full-time job.

Next, the aspiration piece: The "after" body functions as a fantasy of success, social belonging, and desirability. It promises that the right kind of physical transformation will deliver the social rewards that seem perpetually out of reach—respect, love, professional success, confidence.

But aspiration only works if it's coupled with discipline of a particular kind. You must control your food (count macros, track calories, eliminate "bad" foods). You must control your time (never skip workouts, optimize your schedule). You must control your responses to discomfort (push through pain, ignore fatigue, override your body's signals).

The disciplined body is a docile body — one that has internalized surveillance and regulation. The fitness enthusiast becomes their own prison guard, monitoring intake, measuring progress, documenting transformation and handing it all over for sale.

The psychological cost is enormous. Research on eating disorders consistently shows that rigid exercise regimens often function as socially acceptable forms of self-harm, ways of managing difficult emotions through physical punishment. Dr. Jennifer Gaudiani's work with athletes reveals how fitness culture's emphasis on "discipline" and "pushing through" can mask serious physical and mental health problems.

These expectations trap people not just in the gender binary but in other narrow scripts that we rarely examine. Gyms remain dominated by cishet masculinity and hyper-feminine fitness influencer culture. Trans and nonbinary people are erased entirely. Gyms are also sensory nightmares for many neurodivergent people — bright lights, body odor, loud music, crowded spaces, unpredictable equipment sounds. A rigid, shame-filled focus on “consistency” assumes steady energy levels, pain-free movement, and bodies that respond predictably to exercise.

To say nothing of other groups of people with specific experiences or needs (wheelchair users, working-class or low-income communities, daily wage labourers, domestic workers, gig workers, and others in the informal economy). In this hyper-specific production of fitness, it’s a luxury commodity a small group of people pays someone (gym owner, trainer, yoga teacher) to “get,” like it’s something off a supermarket shelf. But movement is a basic human activity, and it belongs to everyone. Everyone gets to (/want to) be strong, flexible, graceful, powerful, or simply comfortable in their bodies.

This isn't about hurt feelings or representation politics, it’s about the stories we tell: when we frame fitness as a matter of individual choice and capacity, we make invisible the structural barriers that determine who even feels entitled to choose. A fat trans person doesn't have "individual choice" about whether to feel safe in a locker room where they might face harassment or violence. A chronically ill person doesn't have "individual choice" about whether to follow exercise routines designed for consistently healthy bodies or to “push past the pain for one more rep” if that pushing is guaranteed to lead to a three-day crash. Someone struggling to maintain housing may not have 5000/- a month to throw on gym memberships.

The individualization of fitness serves specific political and economic functions. It obscures how our economic system produces the conditions that make movement difficult — long work hours, food deserts, car-dependent urban planning, the gutting of public recreation programs. It shifts responsibility from collective solutions to personal optimization.

As Devon Price writes in Laziness Does Not Exist, "When we assume that a person's struggles stem from a lack of motivation or self-discipline, we not only do them a disservice — we also let systemic barriers off the hook." The same logic applies to fitness: when we assume that physical wellness is just a matter of individual choice and willpower, we ignore how race, class, gender, disability, and geography shape access to movement, nutrition, and bodily autonomy.

Later, I found language for my discomfort in the work of Dr. Ayesha Khan:

and…

Khan's essay illuminates something essential: mainstream fitness culture has severed movement from its social and survival contexts. In human cultures throughout history³, physical strength and endurance developed through collective activities: farming, building, dancing, playing, caring for others. Bodies got strong through being useful to communities, not through isolated optimization projects.

The marathon runner's need for constant personal goals, the powerlifter's solitary sessions, the hiker's Instagram-worthy adventures — all of these activities might be personally fulfilling, but they exist within an individualistic framework that treats the body as a personal project rather than a resource for collective care and survival.

This isn’t a bare slate: I think about initiatives like @pullforpride, where transgender and gender-nonconforming people document their strength training not as aesthetic transformation but as claiming space and power. I think about Laura Khoudari's writing on lifting heavy things as a way of processing trauma and building resilience. I think, of course, about the excellent work of Mariah Rooney and Candace Liger at Trauma-Informed Weight Lifting, which I’m having the good fortune to train in.

These approaches center movement as resistance, healing, and community-building rather than individual optimization.

We could reclaim fitness as a story of survival and presence: being able to walk through your city safely, to resist systemic collapse, to sustain yourself and others through whatever comes next. This doesn't erase the pleasure that some people find in bodybuilding or aesthetic goals; it only resists the myth that fitness is one thing, one look, one destiny.

Alternative fitness narratives might center: collective care. Or adaptability/inclusive movement. Or play. Or movement to stay in touch with cultural history. Or movement integrated with ecological connection.

In a burning world, that might mean training for mutual aid work. Being able to carry supplies, set up shelters, provide physical care. It might mean building the kind of embodied resilience that helps us stay grounded when everything else is spinning out of control. It might mean reclaiming the simple pleasure of inhabiting a body that feels alive, responsive, and fundamentally our own.

These notes aren’t meant to shame anyone who finds meaning, community, or joy in conventional fitness spaces. If the gym works for you (it often does for me!), if training for marathons brings you alive, if bodybuilding helps you feel powerful, if yoga soothes, that's real and valuable. That’s experience no one else is an authority on but you. The problem isn't individual choices, though they do matter.

It's the cultural story that treats those choices as the only legitimate ways to relate to your body. It's the marketing that profits from body shame. It's the systems that make movement accessible to some people and impossible for others. It’s the black-and-white thinking that says ALL X MUST Y OR ELSE (e.g. all runners should strength train — reasonable enough in itself, but founded on a bunch of assumptions about homogeneity), fueled by an algorithm that rewards needless hyperbole and sensationalism.

The mirror-covered gyms force us to make eye contact with the stories we tell and have been told about what kinds of bodies matter. But mirrors can be turned, angled differently, replaced entirely. The question isn't whether you're "into fitness" — it's what kind of story you want your body to tell about how to be human in relation to other humans and the world.

When did you first feel welcome (or unwelcome) in movement spaces? What would a gym look like if it were built for your nervous system, your schedule, your body as it actually is? What kinds of physical activities bring you joy, and how many of them fit into conventional definitions of "fitness"?

It makes me think about how easily Westernized (and here I include elite Indian locations) “fitness conversations” collapse into endless optimization, swapping Strava routes, wading into nitpicky debate. Meanwhile, Hatem continues. And so, I hope, will we.