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Notes -
Health, Fitness, Obesity, and Politics
Something that’s been bouncing around in my head for quite some time is how people relate their politics to their personal health. This story from The Daily Beast on Wisconsin Senate candidate Eric Hovde has resurfaced this for me by providing a clear illustration of what I perceive as a current difference between the American left and right on this issue:
The Daily Beast helpfully loops in a putative expert on the matter, a professor at NYU:
This is the latest spat about these sorts of things and probably lays the dichotomous beliefs out about as clearly as possible. There is a policy angle (some people think insurance should be risk-based, some don’t), but that is comparatively dry relative to the beliefs in personal responsibility and how those views extend into political beliefs. There was an old throwaway post from the dissident right blog Dividuals that stuck with me a decade later because of how clearly it captured something that I felt when I read the left-leaning positions:
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At the time, I wasn’t particularly right-aligned, so this wasn’t really an ingroup-outgroup thing, but an articulation of a growing frustration I had with people on the left, this absolute refusal to ever tell people to own up to their situations, take responsibility for where they are in life, and fix it. Everything, always, forever is just contingent on circumstances, completely outside of their control. While I could understand the arguments about this sort of thing when it comes to wealth accumulation or crime, to be so extreme as to not grant that people have agency over what they eat was the kind of thing that was just steadily pushing me away from having any inclination to share goals with the economic left.
Since then, there has been a steady (if not particularly large) genre of articles characterizing fitness as a right-wing phenomenon. Some of these are really silly things about how gyms are gateways to far-right extremism, but let’s look at one example that’s a little more self-serious and not obviously ridiculous:
Vice covers the same thing, but with an oddly smug glee:
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If there was ever a line that called for a YesChad.jpg response, it’s that one. While I am not a particularly big guy, I will self-report that I do believe my work as an endurance athlete has substantially shifted my views against egalitarian perspectives and more towards personal responsibility. Rather than modeling that as being about domination and aggression, I would propose that the mechanism is the personal sense of accomplishment and mastery coupled with knowing how much of it is a direct product of your internal locus of control. I’m not decently fast because of some random freak accident of nature - I wasn’t fast when I started running, I’m much faster now, and I keep getting faster in almost perfect concert with how much work I put into the sport. Others will fare better with less work, such is life, but we all have a great deal of control over our outcomes. So, yeah, I am inclined to believe that pursuing fitness as a hobby will tend to lead one to the right of their current positions.
The belief that fitness is a right-wing thing doesn’t stop with this sort of relatively modest claim about egalitarian tendencies though. The Society for Cultural Anthropology has a weird writeup on Gym Fascism. To go nutpicking a bit, the Manitoba University newspaper has Fitness culture and fatphobia are fascistic - Our obsession with looking the same is culling joy and body diversity:
OK, too much nutpicking. Back to a serious journalistic outlet, Time magazine. Just before the New Year, Time published a story that might dissuade people from making an ill-advised resolutions for 2023 titled The White Supremacist Origins of Exercise, and 6 Other Surprising Facts About the History of U.S. Physical Fitness:
Oh dear.
Anyway, to return to that Hovde story that kicked things off, I find it pretty interesting to think about how these things play with different crowds. Something that’s kind of obvious is that Red Tribe America is not actually very fit at all, while Blue Tribe power centers consistently have quite a few fitness-minded individuals. Nonetheless, when Hovde says that fat people are responsible for their own bodies, it seems to me that most Red Tribers basically agree and accept that they’re fat because they like burgers and beer a little too much, while the Blue Tribers recoil at the suggestion that people are responsible for eating themselves into Type 2 diabetes. This reminds me of how discussions of marriage and morality play out as well - educated elites, regardless of political persuasion, stay married at very high rates and seem to be well aware that this is the correct way to live, but are hesitant to say this about the underclass. They hold standards for themselves that they believe don’t apply to others. As far as electoral politics goes, I doubt this little newscycle item means much of anything, but it does provide a fun case study and litmus test for perspectives on the topic.
It's interesting that we seem to equivocate between "lifting", "not being fat", "aesthetics", "the gym"/"gym bros", fighting sports and fighting ability, strength, and "being in shape" in this thread and discussions of this nature generally, as if they were all more or less equivalent, while endurance gets ignored, briefly passed over as "oh yeah, you gotta do some cardio too", or downright dismissed as a PMC affectation. At least some online endurance spaces are pretty normie left bluepilled (TrainerRoad forums spring to mind), though LetsRun is regularly accused of being problematic. Meanwhile, you yourself are a fairly performance-oriented endurance guy IIRC (I don't know if you own a power meter, but I wouldn't be surprised), there was at least a brief period in the 70s-80s when marathons and triathlons filled pretty much the same subcultural niche that Crossfit (and its knockoffs) and BJJ do now, and long-duration endurance is notoriously a limiting factor in most of the higher-speed parts of the US military. I don't really have a point or even a question here, it's just an observation.
See also: https://www.unz.com/isteve/right-versus-left-movie-stars/
(Edit, that came to me while out running: also, participation in endurance sport is exceptionally white-coded, and indeed competition at the highest levels is dominated by whites outside of running at marathon distance and below.).
Only for indoor training. I stand by Zwift as the killer app for indoor cross-training and having a good trainer makes "hills" feel pretty comparable in-game to being outside. I'm not a competitive cyclist though, so outdoor rides are almost always just fun with friends. But yeah, I'm generally fairly serious about running performance, at least within the confines of being a too old never-was that's not willing to change my diet meaningfully.
It is interesting that these sports don't code right-wing the way that bodybuilding and fighting do. It might just be idiosyncratic, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is a hormonal element - living increases testosterone and endurance sports taken to extremes actually suppress it (although my impression is that it takes quite a bit of high-effort volume for that to be an issue). There are some striking similarities between the cultures of running/cycling and powerlifting/bodybuilding though even if the politics don't jump off the page:
The guys in these sports are just absolute nerds. Bro-nerds, but nerds nonetheless. If you want an earful about physiology, just ask a bodybuilder or a runner.
Highly welcoming of newcomers. The fastest guy at the track and the biggest guy at the gym go out of their way to make newbies that show interest feel welcome, to try to make sure that they know it's a journey for everyone, and that no one's looking down on them as they get started.
These are places where you can find something of a männerbund. Guys work hard together, encourage each other, drive people forward when they're feeling lazy, celebrate successes together, and commiserate in failures and injuries.
Some of this is just that sports are generally excellent, but I wouldn't say the same things are as true in basketball or golf. There's something about the sports where everything is stripped away other than pure physicality and the numbers simply don't lie that's a little bit different.
I was going to mention this as another example of sloppy equivocation but it seemed like it was straying a little far afield. I'm reasonably familiar with the relevant literature, and it seems like we're awfully ready in conversations of this sort to ignore other androgens, androgen receptor status, the differences between acute and chronic effects, what actually counts as a clinically significant effect size, etc. etc. This might be a reasonable analytical approach if you zoom out far enough (pretty obviously in the case of men vs women, for example) but that's surely too coarse a level of resolution to distinguish between "lift 2x, run 5x" and "lift 4x, run 2x" within the same individual.
There's definitely a performance engineering mindset out there in Line Go Up activities, and I appreciate it. But I also see a kind of religion mindset, where as a trainee you do the thing because it's virtuous, a form of worship, and as a coach or advisor you tell people what they should want and what the virtuous thing to do is and baldly assert that one thing or another is true without empirical evidence or sometimes even without a priori logical argumentation--pretty far removed from methodically figuring out how to get from a well-defined A to a well-defined B and rebuilding Neurath's boat. Rippetoe is an obvious case in point, and I say that as someone who pretty much got into lifting thanks to Starting Strength (in fairness, he got a lot worse after 2017 or so). Older heads make it sound like the HIT types of the early 2000s were like this as well. Alan Couzens is an example from the endurance world (and I actually agree with quite a bit of his advice.).
True, though probably 99% of my training has been solitary so it doesn't seem terribly salient to me.
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