Can the Fitness Industry and Body Positivity Coexist?
There’s a movement outside of gyms to make fitness a safe space. Whether the industry will ever fully embrace body positivity remains an open question.
There is one particular video in the Underbelly, the app by body-positivity advocate and yoga instructor Jessamyn Stanley, that I do almost every week. It’s a 36-minute workout of sun salutations that builds up to a yoga posture popularly known as Wild Thing, where you teeter somewhere between a side plank and a backbend. It’s a hard workout that makes me feel badass, but my favorite part — and the reason I repeat the video so often — is right at the beginning, when Jessamyn tells me to go into a “wide-legged” Child pose, with my heels together and knees spread apart. “I love to just make space for my body,” Stanley says as she settles luxuriously into the pose. “I feel like even if you don’t have a belly, it’s nice to just — ” Then she interrupts herself. “Well, everybody has a belly. Well, I guess not every body. #AllBodies.” She laughs and resumes the point: “Even if you are smaller-bodied, it can be nice to just take up space. We spend so much of our lives making ourselves small. So make yourself big and vast.”
