Big Food and Big Fitness
If there is another industry set up to package and sell us something to consume which, when otherwise left untouched by capitalism, has had (can and does still have) a traditional salubrious value for our species, its the food industry.
There are so many parallels that I see running between “Big Food”, and “Big Fitness” (capitalization representing the omniscience and all-pervasiveness these industries seem driven to have), and how these businesses (note: businesses, not healing traditions) can affect our behaviours, for the better and the worse.
Primarily, there is the parallel tendency for both of these industries to profit off of peoples’ insecurities around body image, a near universal shame trigger that strongly motivates our behaviours around food and exercise (particularly in women). The less good we feel about how we look, the more money there is for them to make in the selling of “solutions” which are rarely more than bait- a diet, a fitness program, even a shoe- perpetuating our comparison between how we look with their decided upon societal norm for health, beauty, and fitness.
A second parallel is that food and exercise are both are things we can buy and consume, and their respective industries desire to control the market so that what we aware of that exists to buy is theirs. To choose otherwise is to rebel. From Big Food we learn that it is much easier to be ignorant as to where our food comes from and the intention behind how it was “manufactured”.
What CAFOs, Monsanto, and Tracy Anderson have in common
As an example, take the dominant sources of our food supply: CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations). These are the unsightly, shit-swamp, factory farms that produce the majority of our meat supply, and Monsanto, the agriculture business that has the largest domain over the produce available to buy in the supermarket. These two players dominate our food supply to the point that we don’t think to question where it comes from and what else might be out there because its the norm, its cheaper, and we’re told its just fine to consume.
Similarly, from Big Fitness we have popular figures and companies- celebrity trainers like Tracy Anderson and Jillian Michaels, fitness companies like Beach Body, and spreaders of health trends like Doctor Oz, who believe their way is the best way and have the platform to sell it. Their dogma (whether it is useful or not) permeates our culture. We consume it because it is there in our faces, believing it is true, unaware of the values, goals, and intentions held by their creators.
Is it fair to compare Tracy Anderson to a CAFO, or Doctor Oz to to Monsanto? Maybe not. But my point is that we can make choices, both in food and exercise, that can serve our goals or move us farther from them. The options sold to us by the big industries are often unhealthy (sometimes unethical) and they’re not the only options. Sadly the other options lack the voice to have as strong an impact (though this is changing) and remain hidden from us unless we look. The problem is, most of us don’t know there’s something else to look for.
The choice we often don’t know we have is to rebel against what is being sold to us and actively seeking what aligns with what is truly healthiest and best for us. The latter is to choose the path of exploration, inquiry, and critical thinking.
And so, I feel that this comparison between Big Food and Big Fitness provides a useful analogy to more deeply unpack our question “what is movement practice?”, and unveils some of the ways that these industries thrive on our ignorance, our insecurities, and our tendency to choose what is readily available (remember part 10 which was all about instant gratification).
In Defense of Movement
In his book In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan offers what I feel to be the most simple, concise, and useful piece of advice for any human “eater”: Eat real food. Not too much. Mostly plants. We can apply this guidance to any diet, from raw vegan to paleo to ketogenic to pescatarian (but probably not Breatharian).
From this, I was inspired to distill a similar soundbite of advice for us humans as movers, echoing Pollan’s guidance: Move daily. Not too much. Mostly non-exercise. Similarly to Pollan’s eating advice, I feel this applies to any physical practice, from powerlifting to yoga to marathon running.
A little further along I’ll break down in more detail, as Pollan did in his book, what I mean by these three sentences.
But first…
Commoditization Strikes Again
In Defense of Food is an informative exploration of Pollan’s first-hand experiences of the Big Food industry. How it thrives on us eating more total food, prioritizing quantity over quality (particularly our consuming more processed food products, which are notoriously low in nutritional quality). Pollan describes this commoditization of food as reductionist, replete with fads, deliberately manufactured and marketed to get us hooked.
Commoditization changes what the food is, in particular with the advent of genetic modification, and agricultural “advances” such as mono-cultures that allow us to grow heaps of scientifically altered corn and soy. Mono-cultures are not regenerative ways of growing food and not only produce lower quality produce, but deplete the soil of nutrients in the process (regenerative agriculture, by contrast, aims to use farming as a way to naturally enhance the quality of the land by working with it, not depleting it. It uses farming practices that actually enhance biodiversity, soil quality, and the ecosystems themselves, replicating the cycles in nature that allow a system to thrive).
Pollan would argue that this “enhanced” produce is not even real food (hence the first three words of his advice: Eat real food). In his view, the food industry makes a profit on reducing food to its individual nutrients. Rather than seen and eaten in its whole food form, we have industries that revolve around creating “fake foods” that can be made more nutritious than real foods, with science (think almond milk enhanced with additional B vitamins, or eggs with additional omega-3 fats). Clever impersonations of real food that are “nutritionally equivalent”, or even claiming to be superior, put in a package touting impressive health claims. To this, Pollan has another ludicrously simple yet effective rule to follow: If it makes health claims, it probably isn’t healthy. After all, we don’t need a label to tell us that celery is healthy.
What the food industry fails to consider in its reductionism is that food was meant to be eaten in its whole form. There is a sophistication in the whole food that we have yet to fully understand, that we probably lack the tools to measure yet, and which we miss when all we see when we look at an orange is the vitamin C.
We notice that eating oranges has health benefits. Thanks to our current scientific abilities, we can measure the vitamin C (the discovery of which wasn’t even until 1930, a recent blip in our history). And so we reduce the orange to the vitamin that can be measured, and infuse the vitamin into things it would never be found in in nature- gummy candies, pills, drinks, powders- without considering that there is more to an orange than its vitamin C content. We just don’t know enough about it yet. It was only very recently in our history, after all, that vitamins and minerals were “discovered”, but they were always there. What new compound in the orange will we discover is all important to our health in 2130 that we will decide is useful to isolate and infuse into as many other things as possible? It is this reduce, isolate, and scientific –reinventing process that Pollan warns against.
The nutritional claims Pollan urges us to avoid are smoke and mirrors as the intention behind the business of food is to sell more food at a lower cost while claiming it is just as good as the “real”, unadulterated thing. For example, there is the fact that the government subsidizes the production of those vast fields of mono-cultured corn and soy because it is used in so many products, food and otherwise, giving incentive (or rather, little other choice) for the farmers but to grow more and more of it if they want to stay in business.
Modern day “hunting” for real food
A sad story indeed that it takes actual effort for us to find and eat real food. We have to actively look for it. We have to go out of our way, hunt for it, armed with information, because much of what is sold in big grocery stores are processed and unethically produced food commodities, not gifts from the land.
If you remember back to the chapter on gift culture versus commoditization, we can see this theme emerge once again. Regenerative agriculture treats the land as a gift, and each practice is undertaken with the intention that using the land in an appropriate way leads to its growth and development, and increase in the gift. On the other hand, Big Food takes the land and turns what grows there into a commodity, leading to the slow destruction of the ecosystem’s quality only to produce more food, of higher value on the market, but lower worth to us as eaters.
Food rant complete, what does this have to do with movement?
Did those attitudes feel familiar?
They should. I feel that most everything I wrote above about Big Food could be said about Big Fitness as these industries operate with nearly identical values. Is it not so clear to you? Here’s what I mean.
First, take reductionist thinking. This is rampant in popular fitness culture. Movement is often reduced to specific exercises for body parts. Individual muscle groups are isolated rather than seen for their role with the body as a whole, moving unit. The bicep curl works the bicep, often neglecting to look at how the bicep serves us in full body movement patterns like walking, climbing, pushing, and pulling. But because we are told quantity (in the bicep’s case, size) is more important and we reduce training the bicep to various exercises, sets, and reps in isolation. This takes a familiar parallel with Big Food’s tendency to take the nutrients out of the food and recreate more scientific ways of eating, rather than eating the original, whole food. Similarly to Pollan’s earlier advice, if you hear a fitness trend or exercise program called “scientific”, steer clear. In this way, a workout routine based around bicep curls and other isolation exercises can be similar to a diet based around taking supplements.
Second, in fitness (and in rehab- an often necessary component of movement practice) we are often guilty of blaming muscles for our problems.”Its my tight psoas and weak glutes causing all my physical and psychological problems and I just need to get someone to jab their elbow into it every week”. Psoas and glutes are now labelled as problems to isolate and fix. Similarly to our food paradigm, its often a specific food, macronutrient, or vitamin that is labelled as the problem (too much, not enough) and needs to be cut out or carefully managed. Remember how fat was labelled bad, a primary cause of cardiovascular disease? And then as bodybuilding became more mainstream, eating a ton of protein was the touted solution to all problems? And now present day, low carb is the holy grail. Are eggs good or bad? (the debate still rages on). The demonizing and putting on a pedestal of muscles and exercises, foods and nutrients, often doesn’t solve the actual problem. Taking more vitamin C in isolation to support your immune system won’t help if you continue to live a high-stress life you struggle to cope with and eat a diet that is 50% pizza, just as releasing your psoas and strengthening your glute muscles in isolation won’t necessarily help unless you treat your body as a whole unit and address the underlying cause of these perceived deficits.
We are as guilty of falling for the misleading health claims of exercise fads as as we are for fad diets with similar outlandish claims.
We are susceptible of being marketed the idea that we need to look like celebrities and Instagram fitness models, who then sell us both their workout routines, diets, and dogmas.
We are susceptible to the pull of quantity over quality in both exercise and our eating habits.
In fitness and food, we lack the regenerative aspect: We use our bodies for exercise and deplete our energetic resources (our poor mitochondria…) just as agriculture tends use the land and deplete the soil of its nutrients.
And when we are kept in the dark, we have only one option: Big Food as eaters, Big Fitness as movers. To have just one option is to have no option.
Big Fitness $ells
Sometimes I think my career would be more lucrative if I were more ignorant.
Big Fitness sells to the masses in the short term for two reasons. One, because it feeds on our insecurities: Body image, looking weak, and the need to fit in. Three things that are especially poignant drivers of our choices of behaviour that Big fitness knows exactly how to cater to. And two, this message is spread by people who already have platforms and budgets to market it far and wide.
There are “leaders” and celebrities in the fitness industry who I think care more for having a full roster of clientele (or passive income via their online fitness program) to support their affluent lifestyle goals than they do for helping people create healthy habits for the long term. The leading spokespeople for Big Fitness (who are either honestly delusional or incentivised by monetary gain) are rarely in the business of educating their clients on how to make their own choices so they won’t succumb to the marketing of commoditized fitness. There is profit in keeping people dependent, ignorant, and providing an easy, mindless solution backed up by “science”.
While kept in the dark, many of us have been, and will continue to be, lured in by the touting of health claims and promotion of fitness fads because these speak to our insecurities, are readily available, and most of us don’t know any better. Some people truly believe that pizza counts as a vegetable source, appropriate for children in many US schools because of the tomato sauce (a belief that was ultimately shut down when it was deemed that the slice would need to be swimming in half a cup of sauce in order to be considered a serving of veggies).
And if you will remember the point expanded upon in part 10, most of us are more motivated by instant gratification, and behaviours patterned by our shame, than by the thought of engaging in a challenging (yet enriching) process that delays reward, and thus we are susceptible to this too-good-to-be-true marketing. This is extremely frustrating to witness as a personal trainer, because what I’m offering- A regenerative, healthy movement practice based on an honest exploration of the congruence of their needs, goals, and values- doesn’t sell nearly as well as “burn fat fast with this simple exercise routine you can do while you watch TV!”, and “eat pizza, its a vegetable!”.
In both matters of food and fitness, if it claims to be convenient, fast, easy, and scientific, beware.
Breaking the cycle of dependence
Yes, Big Fitness and Big Food have a lot in common, and one of the main points is that they thrive on keeping us in the dark as to what is naturally regenerative, holistic, and healthiest for ourselves and our society, while keeping us dependent on their commodities for their own profit.
This might seem to be an overly pessimistic view, but in fact, I’m ever the optimist (annoyingly so, if you were to ask a few of my clients). If the only thing Big Fitness has on us is our ignorance, there’s an easy fix- Its awareness. We all have the power to break our habit of dependence simply by starting to recognize how Big Fitness also depends on us feeling ashamed of our bodies, and looking for the next easy dopamine hit in the form of an outfit, exercise, or diet. Its this weird, unhealthy, codependent relationship, and as much as we’d like the industries to change, the onus is on us to break the cycle.
Revolution starts in your kitchen
In an interview a short while ago I heard Dr. Mark Hyman, functional medicine doctor and founder of the Cleveland Clinic, say something that struck me as quite poignant: “Cooking is a revolutionary act”, as it helps to develop critical awareness of what you’re eating, where it comes from, and how it impacts you and society. Not buying in to Big Food starts in the kitchen.
I echo his sentiment here from a movement perspective: Adopting the mindset of movement practice can be a revolutionary act. Not buying in to Big Fitness can also start in the kitchen (or any room, the point is that it need not be a big formal gym), when you decide that in the time it takes for your dinner to cook, or the five minutes in the morning for your coffee to brew, you can connect with your body. It doesn’t need to be an hour. It doesn’t need to be intense, trendy, or even have a specific goal or metric attached to it.
In an economy that thrives on us being less self-reliant and self-aware, following trends, and doing what we’re told we “should”, choosing to move in a non-commoditized, marketed way- choosing to explore what your body can do and move as an act of gratitude- is a revolutionary act.
And as with learning to eat with quality of nutrition in mind, learning to move with our health in mind is a matter of changing values, which is no easy feat. It requires clearing the noise spouting from Big Fitness telling us how to look, feel, and exercise, to do some exploration of the options that are not blatantly marketed at us.
Feeling is Believing
The hardest part is making the first steps into the unknown.
But once you dive in- eat the local, pasture raised chicken, taste the difference, feel the difference in your health, and see the impact that supporting your local farmer has on the community, you can’t easily go back to pulling the wool over your eyes. Sure it may be more expensive, but only in the short term, as in the long term you are supporting sustainable practices both for your health and the environment around you that means you’ll probably spend less money on managing sickness later in life. I would rather spend my money on investing in my good health than trying to treat illness.
The same holds true for movement and exercise. The choices that are truly going to be the healthiest for us and not for the economy of fitness may be more costly up front (but not always, as a 30 minute walk in nature is generally 100% free), less obvious, and less instantly gratifying, but once you start to feel the difference you will be happy to live by the mantra: Move daily. Not too much. Mostly non-exercise.
I think differently about food and practice after reading this post. I realize about it, finally.