The Politics of Fat and Exercise

Posted on May 18, 2004 in Reading Sugar and Fat War

When we were young, when we Americans who are now in our forties were young, our physical education teachers and Boy Scout troop leaders promoted the President’s Physical Fitness Award. They aimed to provoke us to leap into the 85th percentile, near perfection in eight categories which included pull-ups, one arm hangs, sit ups, the standing broad jump, the shuttle run, the 50 yard dash, the softball throw, and the 600 yard run. Sixty five million children — including this one — were tested between 1957 and 1975. I remember running on ninety degree plus days, my mouth as dry as a box canyon in summer, my throat burning like a chaparral wildfire. By this means, I was told, they were helping the unfit become fit.

They lied.

The long runs and the hyper-agilic routines they put us through caused me and several thousand more to grow to hate exercise. The program which was sold to us as a key to lifelong fitness turned out to have an ulterior motive:

….pull-ups and 50-yard dashes and standing broad jumps had little to do with fitness and everything to do with measuring performance. This….was because the battery had been designed with largely military concerns in mind. In that context, the pull-up made sense — every soldier ought to be able to pull himself out of a foxhole. So did the broad jump, the flexed arm hang, the softball throw, and the 50-yard dash. A good soldier should be able to jump quickly out of harm’s way, lob a grenade, hang from a window, or spring towards the engagement line. [Fat Land : How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World, p. 80]

It had nothing to do with staying healthy, everything to do with eugenics. The same í±Šíµ²mensches won it year after year. The rest of us just gave up and grew to hate PE. Taught a different way, we might have carried a different legacy about physical education into our adulthood: we would have realized the importance of getting out and walking places, for one thing.

When health advocates sought to change the program so that those who achieved the beneficial effects of the 50th percentile received recognition and urged that the exercises used be such as to promote lifelong personal health, the drill-sargeants among the physical education establishment spurned the reforms. “This is about making good soldiers.” And once again, in the quest of warmaking power, our country put the interests of its citizens second. So our citizens gave up on physical education.

And I am carrying a payload of fifty extra pounds because of fascist politics. I am not alone.