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Showing posts from September, 2010

Fit, Flab and Flogging the Body

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Remember those dungeons in stories, full of instruments of torture ? Do you ever get the guilts about being unfit? Do you see your friends hit the gym and think "hmmm, I should do that"? Or jog or cycle, or whatever? Well the good news is there is no such thing as being 'fit'. Most of the talk of fitness you hear assumes that fitness is some single thing or state that you can reach with more or less 'exercise'. There are a whole range of interesting assumptions built into that. The most obvious assumption is that nobody is ever just fit. You have to do something to become fit, and then to stay fit. So we're all (apparently) born with slob as our default state. We're naturally flawed, if you like, we can't just be, we have to go out and do a whole lot of physical things for our bodies to operate in a healthy way. Often this is justified by stories about how in earlier times we were all running about chasing buffalos and kangaroos so that we'd ha