Important Note: This panel discusses issues relating to diet and fitness, including mentions and descriptions of eating disorders and mental health issues provoked by fitness standards. Please be aware before viewing the stream or reading the article.
Over on the DCDigitalMedia twitch channel, you’ll find the broadcast from Saturday’s panel “Health & Fitness in the Online Landscape” filmed at the Hilton Galleria. It was hosted by MC Williams, with panelists Charles Blue, Heather Broddy, TVsTravis, and Jerry Peacock, all digital creators with an interest and/or specialization in fitness. (The stream can be viewed here.)
The panel opened up with backgrounds from each panelist about what their fitness journey looked like, and while there were some similar paths, every story was different.
Peacock introduced himself as an IT guy and the owner of Muscle Nerdz fitness. As a young person, he had to get into condition to join the Air Force, but he didn’t get into heavy lifting and bodybuilding until years later, after he left the service. It was being involved in the world of fitness that started his interests in getting active again, and he became invested in breaking down the stigma on both sides between cosplay and fitness/bodybuilding.
Boddy shared her experiences from the perspective of an actress “in a larger body,” and the mental and physical challenges triggered by society’s typecasting for humans in such roles. “I did something where I thought I was being healthy, and it actually ended up ruining my life,” Boddy said.
She went on to explain that the pressure to conform to a specific body image became more like a punishment, and the Geeknasium instructor and podcast host pointed out that “Sometimes, more often than not, when you go to the gym strictly in pursuit of thinness, you’re not actually pursuing health.”
Boddy said that revelations like that made her turn her attention to how health was portrayed in the media, and she found herself picking up a Marvel encyclopedia rather analytically. It was initially a disappointing quest. “I was looking for a female superhero who weighed anything close to what I weigh,” she said. ”I’m like, if you can lift a car over your head, you’re going to weigh more than 150 pounds, okay?”
Boddy said that she found inspiration in the She-Hulk comics, specifically the “Law and Disorder” run by Charles Soule, where a muscle-bound, giantess was portrayed making her way in society as a successful lawyer, hero, and woman.
“I thought that was really empowering and I thought that it was really cool that there was a woman who existed outside of society’s standards of beauty, who was doing all these amazing, empowered things.” Channeling She-Hulk allowed her to find joy and health in fitness again, and she brings those messages of empowerment to her digital content and through her cosplays at cons across the country.
TV’sTravis, aka Travis Crawford of TVstravis.com, said that he went from being an active kid to coping with an injury in college. He recalled that eating like an active teenager didn’t work out so well for him as an inactive adult. He went on his “health kick” relatively recently, when his youthful eating habits started impacting his life in more dangerous ways. To combat weight gain and a growing list of medications, he shared that he had to make the choice to change his relationship with food and activity to start reclaiming his health.
Blue shared how his mother’s Italian cooking and the tight budget of life as a college student sent his health on a different kind of roller coaster. “It was just these moments where I didn’t feel well in my body, that I made a small change,” he said. He turned to exercise in grad school “because it was the only thing in my life that I could control” and he went from being a “large lad” to too skinny, from one extreme to another. Twenty-five years later, he says, he has a better understanding of how to navigate his health and his relationship to exercise. “It’s not a ‘I’m healthy now.’ It’s ‘I have to find, every morning, what’s the right balance to get me to the next day,” said Blue.
While many may know him from his mythology podcast, the panel host MC Williams introduced himself as a distance runner and shared that he had recovered from an eating disorder. He went on to explain that, like Boddy and Blue, Williams learned that pursuing thinness was not the same as pursuing health. He grew up as an active kid who was always “rolly polly” and as a result formed a relationship with food that turned into an eating disorder in college. He said that he worked with a dietician to recover and still struggles with maintaining healthy eating routines.
The well-rounded panel went on to answer more questions, resulting in interesting discussions on how different people can approach health and fitness differently. When asked about their preferred form of exercise, three of the panelists advocated for the often-overlooked value of just taking a walk.
Boddy enjoys channeling her favorite superhero to find inspiration and focus when strength training, keeping health and empowerment at the forefront of the activity for her own mental health.
The group seemed to emphasize that the important part was to just get moving. “My fitness routine is to do anything that sounds fun that day,” said Blue.
When asked about the challenges to getting healthier and how to address them, the panel seemed to agree that the hardest part was letting self-consciousness interfere with motivation and the resulting lack of consistency.
“We are all going to have setbacks, but the trick is not to get discouraged by them,” said Peacock. Getting discouraged often interferes with your ability to see the progress you’ve made. “Believe me, people will see changes in you far sooner than you’ll see changes in yourself.”
“There are many things that are going to hold you back, but there are ways of getting around them and finding out what you can do,” said Blue.
The trap of “diet culture” is another thing that the panel called out as a common challenge in the quest for fitness and health. Boddy identified diet culture as “the pursuit of thinness without regard to your health.” She explained that it will promise results in a fast-tracked timeframe, but the results won’t be sustainable. “That can mess up your metabolism and screw you over for the rest of your life, pretty much.”
To address the challenges, Travis suggested making small changes and cautioned against trying to do everything at once. “The thing that finally clicked into place was for me to make a small change and run with that for a while, build the habit out of that that was sustainable and good for me, and then go onto the next change, and incorporate each one of those as I went,” he said.
Throughout the questions from the host and from the audience, the panelists emphasized the importance in matching your fitness to your lifestyle, from work to family schedules. “Finding something fun and that you all want to do, and that you can do consistently, is key,” said Williams.
When asked about the impact of exercise on actual weight gain, the panelists again encouraged taking care of the whole person, not just focusing on some expected results. Look at factors like improved blood pressure and heart rate, or make sure to monitor your mental health and work with therapists to keep your health goals actually healthy. The entire panel discouraged making your fitness a numbers game.
“Don’t be a slave to the scale because it’s gonna change,” said Travis.
“Don’t believe entirely in the BMI,” advised Peacock. “BMI was created by insurance companies, not doctors.”
Speaking as a writer and scientific researcher, Blue closed the panel with a wholesome, fitting summary. “The human body evolved in a calorie-restricted environment. We are genetically designed to want to have food, and the reason we’re alive is because one of our ancestors got extra food and was able to store it as fat and didn’t die,” Blue said. “So, when people think about exercise and their weight, it’s not you. We are really in an artificial environment. We are in a nutrient-dense, caloric-rich environment that human beings just aren’t designed to handle gracefully. Give yourself a bit of grace and understand that we are also a product of our environment, and it’s a barrage that you have to figure out how to navigate. And it’s hard.”
