Full Description
How is it that Americans are more obsessed with exercise than ever, and yet also unhealthier? Fit Nation explains how we got here and imagines how we might create a more inclusive, stronger future.
If a shared American creed still exists, it's a belief that exercise is integral to a life well lived. A century ago, working out was the activity of a strange subculture, but today, it's almost impossible to avoid exhortations to exercise: Walk 5K to cure cancer! Awaken your inner sex kitten at pole-dancing class! Sweat like (or even with) a celebrity in spin class! Exercise is everywhere.
Yet the United States is hardly a "fit nation." Only 20 percent of Americans work out consistently, over half of gym members don't even use the facilities they pay for, and fewer than 30 percent of high school students get an hour of exercise a day. So how did fitness become both inescapable and inaccessible?
Spanning more than a century of American history, Fit Nation answers these questions and more through original interviews, archival research, and a rich cultural narrative. As a leading political and intellectual historian and a certified fitness instructor, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela is uniquely qualified to confront the complex and far-reaching implications of how our contemporary exercise culture took shape. She explores the work of working out not just as consumers have experienced it, but as it was created by performers, physical educators, trainers, instructors, and many others.
For Petrzela, fitness is a social justice issue. She argues that the fight for a more equitable exercise culture will be won only by revolutionizing fitness culture at its core, making it truly inclusive for all bodies in a way it has never been. Examining venues from the stage of the World's Fair and Muscle Beach to fat farms, feminist health clinics, radical and evangelical college campuses, yoga retreats, gleaming health clubs, school gymnasiums, and many more, Fit Nation is a revealing history that shows fitness to be not just a matter of physical health but of what it means to be an American.
Contents
Author's Note
Introduction: What Is the Fit Nation?
Part One: When Sweating Was Strange
1. Performing Civilization
2. No More Fat Cats or Ladies of Leisure
3. Sanitizing—and Selling—Fitness
4. The California Beach Body Is Born
Part Two: Slimming the Soft American
5. White Plains, the White House, and the Paradox of Prosperity
6. Fitness Makes Us Strong, Not Soft
Part Three: From Margins to Mainstream
7. The Future Belongs to the Fit
8. Training for Life, Body, and Mind
9. The "Tanny Touch"
10. Slimming on the Small Screen
Part Four: Movement Culture, Redefined
11. Yoga and the Counterculture
12. Kenneth Cooper and Aerobics Universalism
13. Run for Your Lives!
14. Title IX and Its Limits
15. Swap the Fat for Your True Self
Part Five: Feel the Burn
16. Daytime Disco
17. The New Gospel of Fitness
18. Turning Up the Intensity
19. Not Quite Sports
Part Six: Hard Bodies and Soulful Selves
20. Beyond Aerobics with Chanting
21. Strong Is the New Skinny?
22. It's Not Fitness, It's Life
Part Seven: It's Not Working Out
23. Exercising in an Age of Uncertainty
24. Eat, Pray, Buy
25. The Limits of "Let's Move"
26. The Pandemic and the Peloton
27. Broken Equipment
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
