Strong, Powerful & Beautiful

As someone who has actively been involved in sports since the age of six, I had never felt the compulsion to obsess over having a good body so long as I was able to score baskets and run good races. There has been a major transformation in the way people perceive and approach the question of health. It has been engendered with a misplaced notion of fitness. In theory, I was very pleased to learn that more and more people are motivated and encouraged to work towards leading a strong and healthy lifestyle. In practice though, the interpretation of strength, the ideal of fitness and the approach to it exposes an insidious side of this concept and the way it’s being adopted.

We all have a body image; feelings about the way we look, and perceptions about how others feel about our looks. We may feel good about certain parts of our body and not as good about others. Body image also concerns with how you feel in your body — if you feel strong, able, attractive, and in control. Many of us struggle with body image because our image of beauty may be an unrealistic, media-provoked, culturally shaped goal. With society’s values, which emphasize thinness or perfectionist fitness, one finds plenty of encouragement and justification for going to whatever extremes necessary to achieve these goals. We are all aware about the problems posed by the various ‘eating disorders’ but the problems that are associated with exercise, ‘activity disorders’ is a less known phenomenon.  

When you are continuously being forced to believe that you have to meet a certain measure of vital statistics, then exercise is likely to become an obsession which will only lead to discontentment especially when combined with a distorted body image or a fixation on a particular body part, this obsession in it’s extreme form may be regarded as an activity disorder. Obsessive concerns about being fat, body dissatisfaction, binge eating and a whole variety of dieting often leads to experiencing guilt, discontentment and self-loathing, which are all ironically acting against the very goal of being healthy.

There is a major flaw in the established definition of strength which is antagonistic and trans-antagonistic. Ever so often, women are expected to contain and limit their workout sessions for the fear of turning ‘too muscular/bulking up in an unfeminine manner,’ while men are under the pressure to lift heavier weights in the bid to ‘get bigger.’ It’s commonly considered a disgrace to lift lesser weights than a woman, hence ascribing superiority to only those men who are of a bigger built. We need to establish one thing here, being muscular has nothing to do with masculinity. Your physique cannot be gender appropriated.

Ladies, please don’t shy away from lifting weights because a healthy combination of weight training and cardio is the quickest way of getting in shape. The many advantages of weight training, include:  counteraction of muscle mass diminishes,  reduction of body fat and burn calories is more efficient resulting in healthy weight loss, slow down of bone deterioration, helps your bones grow stronger, maintain strength, and reduce your chance of developing osteoporosis or slow down its effects and it helps protect your joints from injury and increase your balance and coordination. It engages a lot more muscles than a cardio program could ever achieve.

You don’t have to look like a model for anyone to think that you're beautiful, fit or healthy. We have accepted a completely distorted idea of fitness and reduced it to merely  being concentrated around the physical aspect of one's being. The point of getting in shape is to enhance your confidence, not to shrink it.

It’s important that we care for our over-all well being and reconstitute our definition of strength and beauty. Take up fitness as a lifestyle, without considering it as a tool only meant for achieving photoshop physiques. We must learn to take pride in the way our bodies are built by eliminating the obsession with our imperfections and working towards becoming the best of what we can be.

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Editor's Note: Avantika is a 21 year old fitness enthusiast from New Delhi, India. She considers fitness to be a lifestyle that promotes strength, power, passion, confidence and beauty, and not simply a means towards a superior physique. Her goal is to shatter stereotypes by achieving her fitness goals, and being the best that she can be, without conforming to the unrealistic standards set by society or the media.

Avantika Tewari