The Age of Fitness. Jürgen Martschukat

fitness bracelets to “Know Yourself. Live Better,” and even to “be a better human” (see figure 1). These promptings also come across as promises.¹¹ Fitness is a regulatory and normative ideal of liberal, modern societies. It not only describes how you are, but what you ought to be – and how you can become what you ought to be.¹²

What we have to do, then, is interrogate how fitness operates, while laying bare the processes of inclusion and exclusion it facilitates.¹³ Who is considered fit, and who is not? What happens when some are considered fit and others are not? People are governed by fitness, and this is especially true of liberal societies, which are particularly vociferous in demanding citizens’ voluntary engagement.¹⁴ For the autonomous and self-responsible individual is central to liberal societies. And self-responsibility means ensuring one’s commitment and efficiency in every sphere of life. Those who manage themselves demonstrate their ability to take responsibility for society. Anyone wishing to be viewed as a successful individual and good member of society must be productive, reproductive, and ready to tackle challenges. One has to be hardworking, attractive, and strong. Here fitness plays a regulatory and normative role, though not necessarily through external enforcement in the form of prescription and punishment. Fitness creates zones of marginality and exclusion. This is its regulatory and normative effect. Those who fail to conform to the ideal at play here, who are considered ill or physically impaired, or who are, apparently, neglecting to work on themselves enough to become and stay fit, are marginalized or excluded. The power of fitness, the nature of its requirements, and the emphasis placed on them, have varied over the course of history.¹⁵

      Figure 1 Advertisement for the Microsoft Smartwatch, 2014

Few things more clearly bring out the power of fitness, its linkage with physicality, and the political dimension of this entire complex than the collective fear of body fat. In recent decades, the fear of fat has taken hold of Western societies more than ever before. At first glance, fitness and fatness seem to be polar opposites, yet they are mutually constitutive. Together, they bring order to a culture and society that privileges the efficient, self-directed individual. For the members of such a society, it is obviously unsettling to hear and read every week, from one source or another, that, for example, “Germany is getting fat,” that Germans are less and less active and are becoming “fatter and fatter.”¹⁶ There is always a handy scientific study to quote from when the press or the political sphere declares that around half of all Germans are overweight and about one-fifth obese. More than twothirds of Americans are said to be overweight and almost 40 percent obese, especially in rural areas. Depending on state and demographic group, the obesity rate rises to 55 percent, the key elements being social status, level of poverty and, interwoven with these factors, race and gender. In other words, poor black women in Mississippi are among the fattest of the fat. The particularly fat are considered to have failed to meet the demands of a liberal society. Moreover, fatness is viewed as pathological. It is therefore referred to, using medical terminology, as obesity. Since the late twentieth century, fatness has even been called an epidemic. It is not spread by a virus, but has infected large numbers of people due to certain living conditions and circumstances. The US government officially adopted this medical terminology in 2001 and literally declared war on obesity the same year. The WHO, meanwhile, has for some time been referring to “globesity” to highlight the increasingly global scale of this phenomenon.¹⁷

      I do not intend (and am not qualified) to evaluate the health effects of too much or too little body fat here. The various statements made on this topic are, in any case, highly controversial, while for years the seemingly straightforward relationship between body fat and health has become increasingly contested. For example, the Body Mass Index (BMI) has ceased to be a widely recognized indicator of body fat. Many commentators doubt that the BMI is an effective predictor of disorders and mortality rates. Recent studies have in fact shown that at least a certain amount of body fat is beneficial to one’s health. What is more, some research findings are more likely to be published and receive more attention than others, and those who do not subscribe to the prevalent fatphobia seem to experience a certain publication bias.¹⁸ The social demonization of fatness continues virtually unabated. Here the deceptive power of the visible seems to be at work. People feel they can see with their own eyes that fat cannot possibly be a good thing, but makes one sluggish and immobile.¹⁹

My concern here is not with what is truly healthy or unhealthy, but with the power and persistence of the discourse on fatness and fitness and its social effects. The discourse on fatness is deeply political in many ways. First there is the classic political level. In 2007, the German government adopted the “Fit Not Fat Action Plan,” and launched a campaign known as “IN FORM. Germany’s Initiative for Healthy Eating and More Exercise” in 2008. Initiatives of this kind have been instigated since the 1970s. Fit Not Fat and IN FORM are intended to embed the “healthy lifestyle as a social value” by 2020, improve Germans’ eating habits and increase their physical activity. But it is not laws or punishment that are to pave the way for these changes. Instead, the goal is to appropriately shape the overall framework within which people make decisions and take action, providing them with all sorts of incentives. Government agencies and representatives should be good role models, provide knowledge and information, and motivate people to eat better and exercise more. Germans can continue to decide freely whether to eat fries or salad, whether to stay at home and be couch potatoes or go for a bike ride. But the decision-making architecture should be arranged in such a way as to facilitate a healthy choice. This kind of politics is called “nudging,” a form of governance that seeks to prod or steer citizens to make voluntary decisions that are viewed as “better” and “healthier.” Certainly, from this perspective, free individuals in free societies should make their decisions freely. But at the same time, they should make decisions that are conducive to their own productivity and, therefore, to that of the community. “Prevention,” as the first sentence of the Fit Not Fat action plan emphasizes, “is an investment in the future.”²⁰

Michelle Obama received a great deal of public attention as First Lady of the United States, and it reached its apogee through her campaign against fat. Her “Let’s Move” program was aimed primarily at African American children, the goal being to motivate them to exercise more and eat better. Obama privileged information, incentives, the cooperation of school cafeterias and industry, and her own status as role model. She grew vegetables in the White House garden, cooked with children, skipped, danced, lifted weights, and did push-ups as she made her way through the American media landscape. Of course, the First Lady was aware that a program like “Let’s Move” cannot succeed by issuing directives and that fitness cannot be enforced politically. New York mayor Michael Bloomberg failed spectacularly when he tried to ban the sale of soft drinks by “food service establishments” in cups of more than 16 ounces in 2014 (a similar fate befell the German Greens in 2013 with their “Veggieday”). The New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, ruled against Bloomberg’s “Soda Ban” because the New York City Board of Health lacked the authority to issue such a prohibition. The public and political battle, however, focused not on the powers of institutions, but on civil liberties. The opponents of the Soda Ban assailed the “nanny state” and its alleged fantasies of omnipotence. Michelle Obama, meanwhile, was aware of the tremendous importance of freedom of choice and decision as a political principle, a precept that has shaped the United States since its birth, attaining unprecedented heights since the 1970s. Obama thus eschewed a ban-oriented approach. Instead, she sought to mold the architecture of decision making in such a way as “to make the healthy choice the easy choice,” as she herself put it. Nonetheless, Republicans accused her of state interventionism, highlighting the dogged nature of American battles over freedom of choice and decision.²¹

      But the political dimension of the discourse on fitness and fatness goes far beyond the classic sphere of politics. It is about more than the actions of lawmakers and members of government, action plans, controversial statutory prohibitions, or sugar and fat taxes.²² A culture