Shame and Virtue and Physical Fitness

Or Why Exercise and Nutrition Don’t Make You a Moral Person

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Anyone who knows me knows I care deeply about physical health. Not just my own. I’ll advocate strongly for exercise, nutrition, sleep, getting outdoors, and for physical fitness in general.

I’ll go so far as to say individuals have a responsibility to take care of their own health, including by watching their diets, sleeping eight hours a night, and practicing regular physical activity.

I could argue that you should care about your physical fitness because it will extend your lifespan and improve your quality of life. For the workaholics, I could make the economic argument: in raw monetary terms, investing in your health will pay dividends in reduced insurance costs and lower medical bills over the course of your life – especially in old age. For the “exercise-is-selfish” crowd, I’ll argue that prioritizing your own physical health reduces your future burden on an overtaxed healthcare system, and that improving your own health contributes in some small way to lowering the societal costs in time and money and effort that would otherwise be imposed by neglecting your health. (Setting aside, of course, accident, misfortune, genetics, and a variety of other factors beyond individual control. Society should happily care for victims of natural disaster or brain cancer, for instance.)

But I will never go so far as to claim that physical health is moral. Even the latter argument – that exercising can reduce healthcare costs for other people – is a stretch. Exercise and nutrition are important in my life, and I generally attempt to convince others that it should be important to them.

But while they can make you a better athlete, exercise and nutrition cannot make you a better person. (One could make the argument that both require discipline, which makes you a better person, but you can develop discipline in other ways.) I could argue that physical activity can make you better at being a human being (insofar as humans evolved to be physically active and movement is a fundamental part of the human experience), but not that it makes you a better human being.

Physical health does not correlate with morality. And yet, we act at times as though it does. The main reason for the controversy over “fat-shaming,” is that we associate excess bodyfat with character flaw. Many factors drive this association, but I’ll list a few.

One factor is a lingering remnant of the Protestant work ethic that causes us to sense that fat people might be lazy (in other words, guilty of the sin of sloth). Another, the sense that fat is associated with gluttony and lack of temperance. Partly also, a lasting byproduct of the “Muscular Christianity” movement (the origin of the YMCA), which had its merits but also its excesses, most notably its tendency to correlate bodily fitness with spiritual health.

The association of bodyfat and character flaw is also related to an unhealthy relationship with shame – some kinds of which, in small doses, can be good and useful – but which is beyond the scope of this essay to unpack.

But it’s also due in large part to an unhealthy obsession with aesthetics. Because we fixate on physical beauty, as opposed to moral standing, we feel there is something wrong with being overweight. There isn’t, at least not ethically. But we worship at the altar of the body, and sex is our currency.

Body Positivity:

The healthy side of the body positivity movement has been to recognize the need to divorce the language of morality and the standards of beauty from the fitness movement. The unhealthy side has been the unscientific attacks on the pillars of human health, such as exercise and nutrition. In our egalitarian-aspiring society, we cannot stand the idea that there could be something wrong with our bodies. And, as I said, from an ethical viewpoint, there isn’t (at least not with regards to fat).

But, from a health standpoint, there is something wrong with obesity. The backlash against fat-shaming would rather not admit that. But there is. Obesity raises your risks of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, joint pain, Alzheimer’s, all-cause mortality, and a whole host of other health problems. Some people feel the need to deny these risks to feel better about themselves. But they shouldn’t.

That’s the fruit of treating a health problem as a moral failing. Rather than admit it (and take the first step to solving the problem), some people would rather pretend it doesn’t exist (so that they aren’t burdened by guilt). But by divorcing the two (spiritual health and bodily health), we can begin to remove the actual source of the stigma (the moralizing) and start setting about solving the problem.

Once bodyfat is seen as simply a factor in health outcomes, rather than a sign of whether or not someone is a good person, it will be easier to take steps to address those health outcomes. I’m not foolish enough to think that it won’t still be harder (in some cases, a lot harder) for some people to fix their health than it will for other people. But that shouldn’t be a reason for anyone not to work on the problem.

(I’ll pause briefly to make an aside that “healthy at any weight” advocates are correct that aesthetics have driven us to emphasize chiseled abs, at the expense of actual health. 4% bodyfat isn’t healthy. But 40% bodyfat sure isn’t either. The ideal healthy weight may not be bodybuilding-lean, but it’s a lot closer to super-lean than it is to obese.)[1]

I think there’s another factor. Beyond simply the moralizing. When I tell someone, “You should eat nutritious foods, avoid overeating, and regularly engage in physical activity,” I mean that. But it sounds like I’m telling them what to do. I am giving advice. But we live in a (relatively) free country, and we can each make individual decisions about our diets and activity levels. Perhaps what I should say is, “If you’d like to live a healthier life, you should eat nutritiously and exercise.” But it still doesn’t feel right until I say this part, “But, it’s entirely your decision. You don’t have to do anything. If you’d rather be fat, that’s entirely up to you. Some people would rather be fat.”

Embracing Individual Agency:

While obesity isn’t entirely a choice (again, genetics and other factors play a role), losing weight is. Or rather, it should be. Generally speaking, when people embrace their agency and their desire to be healthy, they will have more success than if they try to lose weight because they feel pressure from other people to “look good.”

But crucially, I think it’s also perfectly reasonable for an individual to think through their options and decide not to lose weight. I’ll give you a couple of anecdotes to illustrate this.

On one particular episode of Car Talk (NPR’s finest hour), either Tom or Ray Magliozzi told a story about an uncle or brother-in-law who was “big.” This relative knew he was big. He was proud of it and he was glad he was big. Not for body-positivity reasons, but because (to paraphrase): ‘thin people exercise and exercise. They watch their diets. And sooner or later, they’re in the hospital, dying of nothing. They linger and linger because there isn’t really anything wrong with them.’ This fellow said he would eat whatever he wanted and ‘sooner or later he’d get a heart attack and it would be over quick.’

Setting aside the science here, it’s quite obvious that this fellow was well aware of the choice he was making. And he chose to be “big.” He wanted to be “big.” If you want to be obese, you don’t have to eat healthy and exercise.

Let me give you a better example. Weight is too caught up in aesthetics for us to fully grasp the idea of making a tradeoff and choosing to have poor health as an acceptable consequence of living a certain lifestyle. Let’s turn to the world of rock and roll.

Lemmy:

Lemmy Kilmister, front man for the hard-rock group Motorhead, was famous for wild living. If you’ve ever listened to a Motorhead record, you’ll know what I’m talking about. You can hear in Lemmy’s voice that he chain-smoked and drank like a fiend (and did other things, too). Even in a business known for crazy parties, Lemmy was a legend.

On a podcast he and his producer made, Henry Rollins (from Black Flag) told a story about Lemmy that’s relevant for our purposes here. Near the end of Lemmy’s (surprisingly not-short) life, Rollins saw him (I believe in the middle of a Motorhead tour). Rollins could tell that Lemmy was in bad health and he thought about suggesting to him that he might want to think about slowing down, taking it easy, maybe laying off the cigarettes and whiskey (and possibly other stuff).

But then Rollins had a profound revelation. He realized that Lemmy knew. He knew this stuff wasn’t good for his health. He knew his lifestyle was destroying his body. He probably knew that it was killing him at that moment and that he didn’t have much more time left.

And he chose it. This was how he wanted to live and how he wanted to die. So, Henry Rollins didn’t tell Lemmy to think about slowing down or taking it easy. He had enough respect for the guy that he let him live with his own choices.

I think many of us have a similar attitude towards the very end of life. There comes a point when we expect that if someone doesn’t have much longer to live, they should probably just enjoy themselves.

But not a lot of us have that attitude towards all of life. That’s a good thing, I might add. See what I said earlier about how you should exercise and eat healthy. And if you’re asking me for advice: no, you definitely shouldn’t wreck your body with drugs and alcohol.

But it’s not my choice – it’s yours.

So, my attitude is that if you want to destroy your lungs with cigarettes, as long as you understand the consequences, that’s entirely your choice. Heck, if you want to become a complete slave to a substance that could kill you very quickly, you can do heroin. I’ve no idea why anyone would want to willingly give up their free agency to a substance like heroin (or even alcohol), but some people do.[2] (Disclaimer: it is still against the law in most countries to use heroin outside of a hospital.)

Back to Fat-Shaming:

Just as smoking isn’t unvirtuous, being fat isn’t. As long as a person is completely aware of the consequences of eating junk food immoderately, of being fat, of sitting 12 hours a day for 70 years, of being physically inactive, of skipping sleep for decades, of avoiding the outdoors, of drinking alcohol in large quantities, of smoking, of doing drugs – all of which I would personally advise against – it’s completely up to that individual to make that choice.

There are things I admire about the “Muscular Christianity” movement: encouraging exercise, using sports as a bonding opportunity for congregations, its success in bringing men – a notoriously difficult demographic for Christianity to reach (especially young men) – into the church (or back into the church). But the problem with it was that – as I stated – it created the misperception that outward physical health indicated inner moral health.

And in our secular society in which health has – to some extent – replaced morality, we have retained the misperception while losing the virtue. It’s more acceptable today to shame someone for being overweight than it is to suggest that there is anything wrong with sleeping with a lover before marriage. And yet the latter is entirely within a person’s control, while the former sometimes isn’t.

The Other Problem with Fat-Shaming:

The other problem is that, when it comes to obesity – as I have alluded to earlier – individual variation in health outcomes is not entirely due to individual choice. There is some element of choice. Not every fat person has the “fat gene,” and refusing to exercise or drinking Sprite every day really does have an impact on health outcomes.

But there is a genetic component. And there is also a lingering in-utero effect: pregnant mothers who consume overdose quantities of sugar every day can give birth to babies who are predisposed to diabetes and obesity and who are in some cases already addicted to sugar (just as consuming crack during pregnancy can predispose a baby to crack-addiction).

(I suppose in some circles, this position is even more controversial than fat shaming.)

And there are other factors that play a role in pushing people into unhealthy lifestyles (although every adult still has agency and responsibility for their own health – this isn’t some BS about food corporations and advertising forcing people to change their desires against their will; it isn’t “the marketing, man”).

In childhood, especially early childhood, parental decisions play a major role (and, to a lesser extent, school lunch decisions). Access to quality food plays a role, but poverty doesn’t cause obesity because fast food isn’t actually cheaper than healthy food, if you know what to buy and if you have access to a grocery store, which not everyone does. (At some stores, you can buy a seven-pound bag of apples and thirty-six eggs for the cost of maybe two Happy Meals.)

Also, once you develop metabolic syndrome, it can be very difficult to lose weight, even if you clean up your diet and exercise (that’s not a reason not to try). Pharmaceutical interventions may be important at that stage. Or multi-day, water-only fasts. It may take drastic lifestyle changes, because many obese people don’t actually eat that many calories (although their bodies still obey the rules of thermodynamics and calories still matter), because their metabolisms are lower than athletic thin people. There’s some evidence that our ancestors ate (a lot) more food than us, while remaining far leaner on average. There are ways (including fasting, exercise, and better food choice) to improve metabolic health, but it takes time.

All of which is to say that one problem with associating virtue and physical fitness (other than that they aren’t related) is that people can have more individual agency when it comes to their virtue than they can with regards to their fitness.

(I still come down strongly on the side of agency – just because something isn’t entirely your fault doesn’t mean you can’t take responsibility for it. And just because you’ve got a harder row to hoe than other people doesn’t mean you can’t do anything – a morbidly obese Scottish man in the 1960s did not eat or drink any calories for over 365 days to lose weight. Look it up if you don’t believe me.)

Conclusion:

I think people sometimes think that my lifestyle choices reflect judgement on theirs. While I don’t always succeed, I try to avoid that. Oftentimes, I am successful.

It’s no secret that I care about physical health. I’ve written extensively on the subject, and haven’t gone a day without exercising since 2015. But I’d be one of the first to say that I don’t think everybody should be like me (because I’ve never wanted to be like everybody else). And I’d also be one of the first to say that if you want to live an unhealthy lifestyle, go for it – it’s (still) a free country.[3]

I wrote this essay because I believe that the health outcome case is the most important case to make for getting in shape. Aesthetics don’t really matter. And if shame or guilt are keeping you away from the gym, you don’t need to feel that way. If staying active doesn’t make you a more moral person, skipping the gym or eating a donut doesn’t give you any reason to feel guilt. It’s more important not to cheat than it is not to cheat on your diet.

Also, for anyone intimidated by heavy weights and loud grunting, or by super-lean people who set the treadmill to 10 miles per hour, don’t worry. Most people aren’t actually judging you, and the opinions of those who do don’t matter (you don’t want to care what those kinds of people think of you).

Some people think that if they go out for a jog, neighbors will look out the window and think, “look how slow she’s going.” That rarely happens. Most people who look out the window will think, “Look at that woman jogging. Good for her. Darn it, I’ve got to start getting back to the gym…”

And my experience in the gym has been that most people are actually glad to see other people making an effort to try to get in shape. If it’s your first time and you’re a little self-conscious about trying to lose weight, most people are not thinking, “look at that fat person.” They’re thinking, “good for him for trying to get in shape!”[4]

And they’re thinking that because health outcomes are important and do affect quality of life. And most people want to live relatively long and comfortable lives with a minimum of health interventions. Which means most people should want to get in shape for the right reasons – not to impress anyone, but to be there for their grandkids, and to have the kind of freedom of activity that physical health ensures, and to have a long healthspan.

Coda – Smoking:

Obviously, the story about Lemmy brings up the subject of smoking. All of what I’ve said so far goes for smoking, too. Everyone knows that it’s bad for your health.

Some people treat tobacco as a moral failing though, and I’ve never really understood that. It doesn’t particularly bother me to be around smokers. Dip is sort of gross, but as long as you’re polite about where you dispose of it (i.e., not in a public sink or on the floor), I don’t mind seeing people chew.

While I think the social stigma that’s developed against tobacco has been mostly healthy in that it’s actually resulted in a cultural shift, the moralizing can be a bit much. It’s even resulted in a “you can’t tell me not to smoke” backlash that mostly comes from the kind of people who think it’s funny to blow smoke in people’s faces. Sadly, we’re starting to see a bit of that on the obesity question, too.

Secondhand smoke may not be as bad as people say, and nicotine (not tobacco) may have health benefits, but smoking is still one of the worst things you can do for your health. But, hey, it’s (still) a free country. They may have raised the smoking age to 21 and banned it in most public places. But at least it’s not illegal everywhere except for a single room in Iowa.

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[1] Body-positivity advocates will point to the fact that a little extra fat is protective against many diseases, and that there is an inverse J-curve with exercise and mortality risk, where at a certain point too much exercise begins to increase risk. A few thoughts. First, the emphasis in “a little extra fat” is on “a little.” Given the shifting standards of our society, we would probably call people with this amount of bodyfat “thin” or “normal.” We might be talking about dad-bod levels of fat: neither Arnold on the podium, nor Jonah Hill. Second, you have to exercise a lot to hit that inverse J. Most people will never exercise that much. Most of those who do think the trade off is worth it. Many people would happily trade a couple years in old age for an Olympic gold medal. Also, it’s unclear whether overexercise can ever completely erase the massive gains in the first part of the curve (where you go from sedentary to active to athletic and your expected lifespan and healthspan increase dramatically). Exercise is still the single best medical intervention that exists, beating every drug on the market, including for Alzheimer’s. In other words, the hardest-core elite athletes may still have longer projected lifespans than someone on the couch. Every drug depends on the dose – including exercise.

[2] Technically speaking, I do understand why people would make that choice. But I think it’s myopic to trade your independence for intense pleasure.

[3] Although it could be freer!

[4] Not in an everybody-gets-a-participation-medal way, but out of genuine pleasure at interacting with other people trying to work towards individual goals premised on shared values.