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People come to running for a variety of reasons: to kick-start a healthy lifestyle, find community, lose weight, participate in races to challenge themselves or go for the win, or any combination of those things (and more). However you find your way into the sport, it doesn’t take long before sports media and culture starts throwing a lot of talk about weight in your face.
And while running is a great sport for helping people build and maintain a healthy body, it is also a sport that can push extreme messaging and breed a negative body image.
We are coming out of a period of time marked by severe fat shaming based on generalizations not fully supported by research. We now know that you can’t simply measure health on a scale—you can be thin and very unhealthy, as well as fat and healthy, and everything in between. Line up at any road race and you’ll see a variety of bodies ready to accomplish the task with grit and grace. The “health at every size” paradigm fundamentally challenges what many of us have been brainwashed by mainstream media to believe. Embracing this new way of…
