I am an active gym member. It’s normally after I utter this sentence that I still wait for the raucous laughter to follow. I do not look like a gym meme. I do not look like I drink a protein shake pre-workout. In fact I don’t look anything like the kind of person who even knows what those words mean. But in the last twelve months my world has changed significantly. I now own and wear pants that have a lycra content that are not specifically designed for under my clothes. I understand what it means when someone shouts “traps down” across the gym. I understand what it means when I read the sign that says no protein drinks down the drain. I am an active gym member.
It’s taken quite a long time to verbalise that statement. Gym members, in my head, for most of my life, have been judgmental arseholes who blamed other people for being fat and had no actual grasp on what it meant to enjoy food or life socially. In my head they all took a lot of steroids and all had very little penises. In my head they were the exact opposite of the person I wanted to be or the person I wanted to project.
I’ve been a member of the ‘I don’t give a fuck what you think about me’ club since my adolescence began in 1992. From the moment those boys in grade 7 made fun of me about my lack of physicality and resemblance to a circus bear I’d decided that I could be liked, popular and funny despite the fact that my arse would consistently grow over the next fifteen years. Once that thought initiates it’s a difficult one to break. I grew up in an age when people bantered on about not judging books by their covers, by looking for inner beauty and that being ‘nice’ was enough to make you a good person. What that philosophy failed to instil in a series of teenagers was that if you don’t look after yourself then being on your way to diabetes and heart failure is much more fatalistic than being a ‘nice’ person.
There seems to be two ends of the spectrum. Education polarised the teenagers of the nineties. Either you wanted to look exactly like 90s supermodel Niki Taylor and you ate nothing at all in front of anyone or embraced the grunge movement and told the world to ‘fuck off.’ I maintained a lovely balance of green army shorts, doc martens and an hawiian shirt – clearly dressing the ‘fuck off’ mentality and secretly wishing that they made sportsgirl logo t-shirts in my size. And if I couldn’t be part of the Niki Taylor crowd then clearly I was going to be a ‘nice’ girl who happened to like Kurt Cobain.
Throughout my twenties I sang the swansong of the fat girl. I don’t care what I look like. I dress for me. You shouldn’t care if I’m fat because I am a good human and that should be enough. I maintained that projection for what seems an eternity. The truth however, is what a load of horse shit. If someone had told me when I was fifteen that it felt this good not to be judged by the size of my pants maybe I would have put down the crumbed sausage earlier. (But probably not.) If only I’d ever known what it felt like to just be part of the crowd. Looked past as if I was just another normal human. Not giggled at, pointed at or made the butt of jokes about sagging suspension then maybe just maybe I could have tried to meet Niki in the middle. 
It’s only now in my thirties that I really have decided to not give a fuck. There are roided up mini men at my gym. There are probably arseholes who look at me and wonder what the hell I am doing with a protein shake and there are probably people who see me with my PT and say, ‘Yeah, lucky she’s got one of those. She bloody needs it.’ But there are also people at my gym who lift weights, have big muscles and just wave and say hello like normal people. We even chat and at no point does my head go, ‘Oh shit, they are going to think I don’t belong here.’
My gym membership has become as much a part of who I am as my job, my choice of reading (and writing) material and my social life. I’ve even made friends there and yes sometimes we obsess over what we should or shouldn’t be eating, what excuses we are going to give to our PT this week and how much did you hip swing today? But we are living a life that we’ve chosen. We are active. We are getting healthy and some of us are still fat. But it’s our label now. Not theirs anymore.
A friend of mine said I’d invested thirty-two years in the body I owned and I couldn’t expect to get a new one without some serious investment. My gym time is not an investment for my body. It’s an investment so that I have future. A life with babies, husbands, travel and mountains if I ever decide one day that I’d like to climb one. Because never, ever again will I choose to be a circus bear and one day I will wear a sportsgirl t-shirt with a pair of check shorts. Shout it proud fat ladies. I CAN RUN IF I WANT TO. (Even if it wobbles.)
life in big frilly knickers 