Why it's time to embrace Fat Bear winter

An anti-wellness backlash has begun, says Alexandra Jones. As the weather turns, she's embracing a Fat Bear ethos
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This autumn we're rejecting the homogenised approach to fitness that we’ve been fed for so long — harder, faster, twice a day — and instead moving like a Fat Bear.
Unspalsh / Mark Basarab
Alexandra Jones23 October 2023

Last week Gillian Anderson revealed that she had long felt antagonised by the nannyish tone of the modern wellness movement. Too many rules and an overwhelming sense that you were always getting something wrong. She’d never attended a fitness class, she told Elizabeth Day, and found the whole concept of tracking calories, macros and steps utterly joyless. A week before that, speaking at a beauty event in London, Sarah Jessica Parker had said something similar, admitting that “laziness” had led her to give up the ballet training she’d once used to stay in shape. Nowadays, she just made sure that she climbed a lot of steps.

Planet Earth III
Gillian Anderson recently revealed that she had long felt antagonised by the nannyish tone of the modern wellness movement. Too many rules and an overwhelming sense that you were always getting something wrong.
PA

Something of a wellness backlash is in the air — and not just among the world’s acting elite. Since hitting a peak in 2016, when more than 6.5 million Britons were regularly going to barre, CrossFit or any one of a multitude of classes, attendance has been steadily falling. Numbers tanked during the pandemic (for obvious reasons) and according to the latest figures from Statista, have never recovered.

Almost 15 years since I sat on my first spin bike, I too have succumbed to fitness class fatigue. A spin instructor recently implored the class to imagine they were “riding away from the horrors of war”. I chugged away on my static bike to Timber by Pitbull, thinking “this is moronic”. And more than moronic, it was lacking in any kind of joy. But then I realised that joylessness had become the background emotion to all my fitness endeavours.

I think it was the fitness tracker that did it. I’d resisted getting one for the longest time but everyone was so adamant I’d love knowing my heart rate at any given moment (it’s worryingly erratic) or how many calories I burned on a slow bike ride to work (witheringly few) that earlier this year I finally bought one. Anderson’s words struck a chord with me when I realised that I’d become a slave to the little tyrant on my wrist.

Front view of a young redhead woman watching TV at home
The fitness tracker encapsulated all the problems with our current approach to fitness: it was overly prescriptive, anxiety inducing and served to sever any connection I had to my own internal sense of wellness.
Getty Images

The first FitBit hit the shelves in 2009, and can you believe that before they marketed 10,000 as the gold standard (a figure, by the way, simply plucked out of thin air), no one ever considered how many steps they were taking on any given day? That’s right, we walked around with no way of recording that valuable data. Nowadays, there are an astronomical number of trackers on the market. Though it is perhaps telling that last month the New York Times reported a growing trend among professional and semi-professional runners in the US of eschewing GPS-powered fitness trackers in favour of old school stopwatches. Without the split data to worry about or the in-activity prompts to disturb them, the runners could focus on finding a pace that their bodies were comfortable at; they could just enjoy the experience of running.

For me, the tracker encapsulated all the problems with our current approach to fitness: it was overly prescriptive, anxiety inducing and served to sever any connection I had to my own internal sense of wellness. I’ve stopped wearing it, and after many years of slavish devotion to fitness classes, I’ve stopped going to those too. Too expensive, too prescriptive — no more. This autumn, I’m going full Fat Bear.

The Fat Bear ethos is all about joyful indulgence — periods of true rest (not to be confused with performative rest, like if you’re visiting a woodland for a ‘Fall aesthetic’ photoshoot); eating foods which are excessively cheesy or saucy or both, with your hands so that you are forced lick your fingers (and possibly change your shirt afterwards); letting the finer details of party politics wash over you; switching off trackers, Twitter and TikTok (unwire yourself from the dopamine machine!); giving your receptors a few weeks off.

Brown Bear, Katmai National Park, Alaska
Fat Bear ethos is about rejecting the homogenised approach to fitness that we’ve been fed for so long — harder, faster, twice a day — and instead moving like a Fat Bear. No, I don’t mean on all fours (but obviously, you do you)
Getty Images

It’s about rejecting the homogenised approach to fitness that we’ve been fed for so long — harder, faster, twice a day — and instead moving like a Fat Bear. No, I don’t mean on all fours (but obviously, you do you). I mean slowly, with purpose and with the knowledge that this body needs to keep you alive for the coming winter, and to do that it needs lots of TLC and probably a few extra pounds.

There can be no denying that exercise is good for us, but even fitness brands are coming to understand that the obsession with the body is making no one happier — or fitter. Two weeks ago, a Onepoll survey found that performance-obsession has caused 68 per cent of Brits to feel too embarrassed to go to a gym, they’re worried they don’t look like a ‘typical’ gym-goer. We need to get back in touch with a kind of movement that actually gives us joy — I certainly do. And if I gain some pounds in the process, at least I’ve had a good time. Happy Fat Bear autumn to all.

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