"Jia Ling lost 100 pounds, and my body anxiety increased 100 times"

Human body parts are not born for the sake of styling and long-term maintenance of the posture of taking pictures and "out of the film", the most important function is to maintain the needs of a person's daily actions and physical signs. The criteria for defining a certain posture should not be that it does not conform to various standards of beauty.

Author | Zhang Wenxi

Edit | Yan Fei

Title Picture | "100 Yuan Love"

The popularity of "Hot and Hot" and Jia Ling's successful experience of losing weight have once again brought a boom about fitness.

But after the Spring Festival, Jia Ling's remarks about "losing muscle" sparked controversy in public opinion. In a recent interview with Lu Yu, Jia Ling said that she doesn't need so much muscle at this stage.

Some people regard it as a backstab to women after "becoming thin and beautiful", thinking that she is misleading the masses and making the aesthetic trend return to white and thin. However, Jia Ling's original intention was that it was not necessary to maintain the athlete's body and exercise intensity in her daily life, so she adjusted her training plan accordingly.

Some viewers misunderstood Jia Ling's point of view in the interview. (Photo/@鲁豫有约 Weibo)

However, no amount of clarification can resist the marketing of body anxiety on social media. Many gyms seized this trend and played the slogan "Jia Ling has lost weight, what are you waiting for?", once again outputting the concept of "to be beautiful" and "to be thin". Some fitness videos repeat the same old tune, and they have begun to promote deformed aesthetics such as "right-angled shoulders", "ant waists" and "butterfly bones".

The first fitness fever of the year, why did you drive back again?

01

In order to make a bad shape,

Is it worth sacrificing health?

The discussion around women's fitness always seems to be contradictory. Some women liberate themselves through fitness and explore the possibilities of their bodies, while others strive to shrink their bodies and embed them in the mold of social aesthetics.

If fitness is compared to a carving knife, every woman who wants to sculpt her figure may be different. Some people want to get rid of a large base weight and reduce the burden on their bodies, some people want to improve the strength of a certain part of their body through strength training, and some people want to become a body for social media marketing through fitness.

（图/《BLACKPINK: Light Up the Sky》）

In recent years, the entertainment industry's requirements for female artists' figures, through the spread and fermentation of social media, have made a series of female figure "indicators" popular one after another.

Take "Right Angled Shoulders" as an example, it became popular because of the body promotion of Jennie, Lisa and others of the Korean girl group Blackpink. Later, some gyms and fitness bloggers seized on the dividends of this buzzword and used marketing methods to amplify the concept again.

The so-called "right-angled shoulder" refers to the fact that when a person stands naturally, the neck and shoulders, and the junction of arms and shoulders can form an angle that is approximately right-angled.

However, the shoulder angle of an adult woman is generally 10 to 30 degrees, with an average of 22 degrees, and it is very rare for the neck and shoulder lines to be naturally close to right angles. The right-angled shoulders of stars are often made by shrugging shoulders or hanging back of the shoulder blades.

(Photo/"Single is Hell")

These associations of the "perfect body", with the female stars appearing on TV shows and social media, are projected onto people's minds and have a subtle impact on people's aesthetics about the female body.

On the video platform, almost any teaching video on "how to train a right-angled shoulder" that is at the forefront of the recommendation has tens of millions of views. The user-oriented Internet, through the recommendation of search engines, "feeds" the training videos of "right-angled shoulders" and "A4 waist" to the user's mouth, once again strengthening these aesthetic standards.

The large number of views of the video tutorial on the "right-angled shoulder" shows that this type of training is in great demand. (Picture/video website screenshot)

Many people believe that right-angled shoulders can support clothes and make people look more temperamental. However, from the perspective of human physiological health, a right-angled shoulder in the full sense may actually bring about diseases.

Ennaji used to run a gym and is now a fitness instructor. In his opinion, many so-called right-angled shoulder exercises are mainly based on creating strong scapular rotator muscles to produce a "right-angled shoulder" with a frontal perspective. "For the trainer, it should be possible to imitate and learn from a variety of postures. But from the perspective of health, we should distinguish between good and poor posture. ”

Some people have misconceptions about women's fitness training demands. (Photo/Visual China)

However, advocates of the aesthetic of deformity often say nothing about the physical damage caused by the right-angled shoulder.

"If you are not born with a posture, but if you form a right-angled shoulder through training, it may lead to shoulder and neck pain, obstruction of shoulder joint function, etc., and in severe cases, it will affect breathing, chest tightness and shortness of breath. Dai Yunlong, who works as a trainer at a women's fitness studio in Guangzhou, explained that the normal shoulder should be when the hands are naturally lowered to the sides of the body, the shoulders are not moved forward, the midline from the shoulder blade to the spine is between three to four fingers, and the collarbone is generally S-shaped, with a zero to five degree tilt between the horizontal line.

Strength transcends the evaluation system about beauty. (Photo/"Call of the Siren: Fire Island Survival Battle")

Some women are happy to put on a look and prove that their figure meets a range of aesthetic standards. However, when people follow society's requirements for a woman's body, the result may be an unhealthy body.

The most important function of the human body is to maintain a person's daily actions and signs. The criterion for defining a certain posture should not be whether it does not conform to various standards of beauty, but whether it can help people to complete their movements better and make their bodies stronger and healthier.

02

body anxiety in women,

It's time to get rid of it

Many modern women not only want to add beauty weights on their bodies, but also want to reduce the parts that don't look so elegant.

In addition to the "right-angled shoulder", trapezius muscles are also the hardest hit area of women's body anxiety on social media. Some practitioners in the fitness industry take advantage of the poor information to portray the objective physiological structure as a body defect.

Influenced by this kind of information, some women will deliberately avoid some training movements for fear of making the trapezius muscles more visible, or hope to "eliminate" the trapezius muscles through some training. In order to cater to this mentality, many fitness bloggers also have the words "eliminate trapezius muscles" in the caption of their videos.

The trapezius muscles are important muscles for maintaining stability in the head, shoulders and neck. (Photo/Visual China)

But physiologically, there is no need for women to be anxious about trapezius muscles. Dai Yunlong believes that the trapezius muscle plays a very important role in stabilizing the head, shoulders and neck, "It is normal to use the trapezius muscle during training, and when the training target is weak, the trapezius muscle will produce corresponding compensation." ”

In Ennaji's view, people should not try to "kill" the most important muscle in the upper back by means such as shoulder slimming injections. "The trapezius muscle is second only to the latissimus dorsi muscle in span, and is the most important lifting and supporting muscle group in the human back, and it is also a key muscle group that coordinates core functions. It complements the latissimus dorsi muscle and makes an important contribution to a stable and robust gait cycle. ”

Jennifer Aniston, known as the "American sweetheart", has always maintained a fitness routine and has made no secret of her trapezius muscles. (Photo/"Friends" Season 7)

In the traditional social concept, there are few requirements for men to have physical requirements. And every woman, to a greater or lesser extent, has been criticized for her body shape or body shape. For this reason, many people keep an eye on the numbers on the scale and themselves in the mirror, drawing the ground as a prison.

In 2023, a media survey by The Paper pointed out that 47% of women with a standard body shape (BMI index within the normal range of 18.5-23.9) consider themselves to be fat, much higher than men (18%). However, according to a research paper published in 2023 by Professor Mu Yiming's team at the PLA General Hospital (Beijing 301 Hospital) and Novo Nordisk and Meinian Health Research Institute, overweight and obesity are more common among Chinese men than women.

(Photo/"The Great Hunger")

The surging news wrote in the report: "In the statistics, a post-90s girl with a height of 162 cm and only 84 pounds, whether it is the evaluation standard of the National Health Commission or the evaluation scale of the public's 'weight is not more than 100', she is in a thin state." But when we asked, 'What do you think most people think of her body?', she said she was on the fat side. ”

For a long time, women's body anxiety lingers, with meat in the lower abdomen, thick thighs, and accessory breasts, etc., which are the reasons why women feel that their bodies are not perfect.

But if you understand the physiology of the woman herself, you will know the necessity and rationality of the existence of these signs.

(Photo/"Ms. America")

For example, because of fertility, women have a wider pelvis and a greater physiological curvature of the lumbar spine. The congenital structure makes women more susceptible to the loss of core recruitment, which in turn leads to bulging lower abdomen, thick thighs, and lower back discomfort. This situation, while bad, is objectively and truly present in women.

And the abdominal fat, which has always been disliked by women, also has a reason. Compared to men, women naturally have a higher body fat percentage. A woman's uterus is located in the lower abdomen, and the uterus needs to maintain a certain temperature, and fat plays a role in maintaining body temperature. As a result, women's lower abdomen is more likely to have a layer of fat.

In many cases, the part that people want to try to eliminate is precisely the physiological structure of the body itself and the function to protect itself. And some of the rejected physical traits are, on the other hand, symbols of talent.

Ennaji remembers that she once took a female student with a great talent for fitness, but she preferred a figure with thin arms and legs, and felt that her figure was too thick. In this regard, he said that aesthetics should not be constrained by posture, and the power potential of women is far beyond most people's imagination.

Taylor Swift's song "Anti-Hero" mentions that he also had body and weight anxieties. (Photo/"Anti-Hero" MV)

Back to recent events, Jia Ling lost 100 pounds in the movie, and the biased discussion once again focused on a new round of body anxiety and marketing, which is contrary to the theme of the movie: whether fat or thin, beauty has never been a necessity for women. The key is not to be beautiful, but to be healthy and strong in mind and body.

In the face of the bad comments caused by the misinterpretation of the expression, Jia Ling's recent Weibo seems to be a response - "I will shoot what you see".

And she also previously said that "Hot and Hot" is not a story about weight loss. "I don't want to cause body anxiety, but the growth of this character and what she has to do is indeed shown through the change of appearance, and I hope that the audience will go to the cinema to see that she has become stronger, not thinner. ”

(Photo/"Hot and Hot")

Xiong Huan writes in The Creation of the Mortal Body: A Narrative of Chinese Women's Fitness: "The empowerment of the body stems from how the subject experiences his or her body, exercises effective control over the body, and thus dominates her own body. ”

In the movie, someone saw a figure that had lost 100 pounds, and searched for a tutorial on "how to train an ant waist and comic legs" with her backhand;

(Photo/"100 Yuan Love")

Women's fitness should aim to gain strength, break free from and break the inherent social aesthetic shackles. Instead of the other way around, he brainwashes and exploits himself again with weight, size, and posture, restricting the freedom of his body.

Even if it's about losing weight, whether it's to meet a certain aesthetic standard or to be healthy, the two goals will lead to different paths. As for the choice, it has always been in the hands of the women themselves.

Proofreading: Meet, Operation: Lu Zirui, Typesetting: Liang Ningyan