The Dangers Of Working Out For Vanity

Fitness is important for everyone and if you are able I highly encourage you to incorporate some kind of movement into your everyday life to improve your physical health. There is nothing wrong with working out to lose weight because everyone has different goals and some may need to shed a few pounds while others might want to gain some muscle but I have always been a believer of if your going to exercise to do it for the right reasons. I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad fitness goal but I do think all goals should be about improving yourself instead of strictly out of vanity because you hate yourself. There is nothing wrong with wanting to improve and if you want to work out for vanity I am not going to tell you not to do that but personally, I don’t think your only reason for working out should be to change your physical appearance because it can dangerous and often leads to obsession. In this post, I am going to talk about the dangers of working out for vanity reasons and why you shouldn’t use exercise as form of self-hatred.

It’s not about health– Fitness should be all about improving your physical health and should not be used as a form of punishment for all the things you ate that you shouldn’t have. When you exercise for vanity reasons you are taking something that should be all about health and turning into a form of self-hatred. There is nothing wrong with wanting good because I think we all want that and using exercise as a tool to improve your physical health but you should not only be exercising to change your body. It should be all about lowering your risk for certain diseases and improving your overall health but it’s not about that when the only reason you work out is to be skinnier.

It can create an unhealthy relationship with exercise– When you do a ton of horrible exercise because you are so desperate with changing your body it can damage your relationship with exercise and make it so you hate movement. I can remember when I started my fitness journey how desperate I was to get results that I would do tons of horrible exercises I hated because I was willing to do anything that would change my body. It worked for a couple of years but eventually, I reached burnout and started to hate exercise because I was forcing myself to do movement I did not enjoy. Fitness is important for improving your physical health but you can destroy the relationship you have with exercise when you are not doing unhealthy amounts of exercise that you hate which is what I did for years and I would have totally given up on exercise if I did not change my why for working out. I am huge advocate for exercise if you can but I do think if you want to make it last long-term you need to be engaging in movement that you enjoy. It is not easy to come out of an obsession of exercise and an easy way to avoid that from happening is to not work out for vanity!

It may lead to an eating disorder or disordered eating– If you have ever followed a fitness influencer that is all about getting abs you may know that a lot of them support eating protein powder for every meal and to not eat too many carbs. Nutrition plays a huge role in reaching your fitness goals and I am a huge advocate for healthy eating but I do not support any type of diet that tells me I won’t reach my goals if I eat more than twelve-hundred calories because for most people that is not enough. You can reach your fitness without eating protein powder for every meal and it can actually be very dangerous to seriously restrict yourself because sometimes it leads to disordered eating or eating disorder which you don’t just snap out of. I know from years of disordered eating that it’s hard to unlearn and I think I struggled with because I was desperate to change my body that I was willing to follow horrible diet programs if it was going to get me the body I was aiming towards. Is it really worth it to have more muscles but worsen your relationship with food in the process because your forced yourself to follow a horrible diet program? I don’t think it is because you don’t have to put yourself on a horrible diet to reach your goals. Working out for vanity can be dangerous because sometimes it makes you obsessed with healthy eating which often causes disordered or worse and eating disorder1

I will never have the body that society deems as acceptable– When it comes to body image society has these standards of what they deem as healthy which I don’t always agree with because you don’t need to have abs to be healthy and sometimes having them might be someone is not healthy. I will never have the stick-thin body with abs that society wants everyone to have because as a disabled person, I can do a lot of exercises required to get that. I work out to improve my strength because you can’t always change your body and sometimes you are stuck in the bigger body God gave you and there is nothing wrong with that. It is not always in your genetics to get super skinny because even though your best friends can do a HIIT workout and lose five pounds that doesn’t mean you will have the same result. We all have different body types and can always change our bodies to make it more acceptable for society and I think it’s kind of silly to try to work towards a certain physique because it’s not always possible

Fitness should be all about improving your health but unfortunately when you are working out for vanity it’s not about health and it has everything to do with hating your body. . There is nothing wrong with wanting to lose weight to improve your health but it can be dangerous when your turn in into an obsession and create unhealthy habits.. When I was in high school I was not happy with my body that it made me obsessed with exercising all the time and afraid to eat something that was remotely unhealthy. Everyone benefits from a healthy relationship with food and exercise but you are not going to have that when you are using exercise as a form of punishment. Society wants us to believe that the body we are in is not good enough and that we need to change it but you should not buy into it because diet programs make money off your insecurities. Fitness benefits most people but do it for the right reasons because when you won’t appreciate how far you have come when all you care about is changing your body that might not be able to be changed. What are your thoughts with working out for vanity reasons?

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