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Summary
On episode 324 of 40+ Fitness, Coach Allan sits down with Samantha Brennan and Tracy Isaacs, two PhDs and academics who write Fit as a Feminist Issue, a blog offering feminist reflections on fitness, sport, and health, and who co-authored the book Fit at Midlife: A Feminist Fitness Journey.
Samantha and Tracy argue that fitness has been wrongly tied to thinness, and that almost every fitness plan on the market is secretly a weight-loss plan in disguise.
The conversation walks through their two-year “Fittest by 50” challenge, why they put the bathroom scale away, and how they measured success by what their bodies could actually do rather than how they looked.
Links
- https://fitisafeministissue.com
Key Takeaways
- Fitness should be divorced from thinness. Samantha and Tracy argue that nearly every fitness program is built around weight loss, which sets up two losing groups: people who work out, don't lose weight, and quit, and thin people who assume they're already healthy and never train at all.
- Being thin does not mean being healthy. The hosts point to “TOFI” (thin outside, fat inside): people who look lean but carry high body fat and low muscle mass, so they get winded on stairs while everyone assumes they're fine.
- The Fittest by 50 challenge was a two-year commitment, not a countdown to quitting. Both women set out to be the fittest they had ever been by age 50, and both kept training well past that birthday because the goal was setting up the second half of life, not finishing a program.
- Tracy put her bathroom scale away to break her obsession with body image. She packed it back in its original styrofoam packaging and put it on a high shelf, then switched to intuitive eating (eat when hungry, stop when satisfied, no weigh-ins) to stop letting the number define her.
- Signing up for something hard can force a mental shift. Tracy trained for a triathlon despite barely being able to run, ride a road bike, or swim, and the challenge of just finishing crowded out her focus on appearance entirely.
- Trying new activities reveals what actually fits your life. Samantha took up rowing and loved the camaraderie, but found its rigid scheduling and heavy equipment logistics didn't work with her career and travel, so she filed it away as a “retirement sport” and kept riding her bike instead.
- Body image carries a heavier social weight for women than for men. Samantha notes that while men feel pressure to look muscular, women's appearance occupies a larger share of how they're judged and treated, including biased assumptions that larger people are lazy.
- Fitness wins should be measured by daily function, not appearance. Coach Allan cites a client whose squat training let her comfortably get in and out of a low sports car for the first time, the kind of real-world capability the authors say fitness should be built around.
- Everyday tasks getting easier is proof the training is working. Tracy noticed her groceries used to feel heavy at 48; after two years of resistance training, she could lift them overhead, a concrete marker of progress that had nothing to do with the scale.
“We want to divorce the idea of fitness from the idea of thinness.”
Samantha Brennan