Tuesday Truth: The "Strong Is the New Skinny" Controversy

Yesterday, I read an article offering a different perspective on a saying that I really love (and have mentioned on the blog a few times before), “Strong is the new skinny.”  I definitely recommend reading the article, as it brought up some great points about this concept, but if you don’t get to it, here’s the basic premise: 

The author, Kim Shand, believes that as a culture, “Strong is the new skinny” isn’t necessarily a good thing for us. She states that with this slogan, we are just replacing one unrealistic standard, “skinny” with another, “strong,” again setting ourselves up to focus (and obsess) on the outside of our bodies instead of the inside. 

Great observation, right?

It’s a beautiful article that really hits home when it comes to body image, and made me think a lot about my own love of the phrase “Strong is the new skinny.” As someone who has struggled a lot with body image throughout my lifetime, I found this article to be both extremely insightful and important, yet I also feel that her observations differ slightly from my own experience.

When I first saw the slogan “Strong is the new skinny” on a t-shirt at a CrossFit competition, it felt empowering. I felt like this slogan was saying that finally, it’s okay if you aren’t skinny. In fact, it’s better than okay; Being a strong, powerful woman is much more important than being skinny! And for me, that was a wonderful new message to hear in our society; I’d never heard it said in that way before.

As a woman who has spent much of her life hating her body, wanting a shape that is unrealistic for her frame, and putting her body through hell to try and attain it, hearing “Strong is the new skinny” felt wonderful. Not because it meant that I could shift from being obsessed with being skinny to being obsessed with being strong, but because it said that there is more than one “ideal,” that there are other ways to be, and that strong bodies should be celebrated just as much as skinny ones are.

That was something I could get behind.

And yet, I completely understand what Shand, and other authors who have come out and said something similar about our new obsession with strength, is saying. Everything can be taken too far, and in our culture, we tend to do just that. But here’s another place where I differ slightly with Shand’s take on the subject--and in particular, on it's relation to our yoga practice—she thinks it's a problem that students come to her classes to get more definition in their arms, and I don’t.

In the past few years of teaching, I’ve been extremely inspired watching students come to the mat. Yes, many start yoga because they hear that Jennifer Aniston practices, and that she owes her sculpted form to yoga, or because they want to lose weight or become stronger, but I’ve found that quickly, these students’ get much, much, more from the practice.

Although it took a while to get here, I’ve come to have an attitude of, “Hey, whatever gets you coming back to the mat.” More often than not, yoga quickly teaches students more than just how to stretch before a run, or how to increase flexibility so that they can lift more at the gym. The practice itself holds great life lessons and power, so I’ve come to be fine with those students who start practicing for superficial reasons, as I think that eventually, they’ll find more where that came from, and hopefully, learn to accept their body as it is [and gain a sense of both inner and outer strength]. 

I started practicing because I was injured from running and the doctor said that I couldn’t do any other physical activity. You’ve probably heard me say this before. But guess what? I didn’t start practicing for the healing qualities, for the mindfulness, for the spirituality of the practice, I started practicing because I was obsessed with staying fit and thin, and I wanted to keep exercising in I whatever way that I could—injury of not—in order to ensure that I didn’t gain weight.

Fast-forward to the present, and yoga has flipped my world upside down. I'm now a teacher, and my primary goal for practicing is not to be strong or skinny. I practice because I can’t imagine not practicing, because yoga has changed my life and my relationship with my body, and because it has offered me a sense of peace, self-love, and acceptance that nothing else has ever given me. 

That is the new skinny.

Acceptance is the new skinny. Self-love is the new skinny. Curves are the new skinny. I think any of these words could replace the word "strong." For me, what matters is that there is a new skinny--that there is something out there besides skinny, and that women are invited to embrace it. That’s a *beautiful* thing to hear.