I admit, the idea for this post was not really my own. My sister, who’s much smarter than I, idly mentioned to me a few months back that it had occurred to her that our modern culture’s obsession with “health” (i.e. diet, exercise, & weight management) is analogous to religion in medieval culture. That, for us nowadays, “health” and “fitness” are basically our substitute for God.

And I’ve been mulling over that for a while, and I think it’s really true. And, tbh, really messed up.

“But Mith,” you may be saying, “health is so important! It’s a great thing to care deeply about.”

Of course health is very important! But “health,” in the classic sense, does not mean the things that people today have been led to believe it means.

A person is physically healthy if they’re: basically eating a pretty balanced diet, they’re at a pretty normal weight, their body does what it’s supposed to do without issue, and they don’t have any serious illnesses or glaring physical problems or abnormalities. Things like: taking a walk to get some fresh air and aid digestion. Staying generally active to keep your strength up. That’s a pretty general picture of “health,” right, and a pretty good standard.

But these days, physical “health” means: thinness, intentional muscle building, macro- and micronutrients, weight lifting (with perfect form), striving for the ideal body shape, whole foods, protein maxxing, intermittent fasting, skinniness, creatine, pedometers, BMI, this that and the other ratio, gym memberships, thinness, personal trainers, expensive name-brand water bottles, expensive skincare products to reduce the appearance of aging, thinness, expensive all-natural organic locally-grown this that and the other, being skinny, looking “sexy” into your fifties and sixties and beyond, being skinny, being as thin as possible, and so on and so on and so on. All of this is pretty newfangled and trendy. And I don’t think it really has much to do with “health.”

Like, people online are seriously out here calling fashion model Ashley Graham “morbidly obese” and “unhealthy” — when she is not only insanely beautiful, but also an objectively average body size. (And I don’t mean “average for an American woman,” because in America our “average” is heavily skewed due to how many of us actually are obese; I mean average for a healthy human woman regardless of context.)

WTF. Where is this skewed, exaggerated definition of “health” coming from? And why are we so obsessed with it that we treat it like our religion?

It comes from companies who want our money. That’s what it comes down to.

Every time I see someone calling someone like Ashley Graham “morbidly obese,” I see someone who’s completely brainwashed, who’s fallen prey to the money-grabbing schemes of the corporations, the retailers, the advertisers, the content creators.

No shame. Most of us do fall for it, at some point, to some extent. I fell for it myself, as a kid, with disastrous consequences. As so many of us do.

It’s really only recently that I’m coming to this realization that this obsession with Health is just a modern-day paganism – it’s idol worship. It’s a hypnosis induced by another flashy advertisement for some product that neither I, nor anyone (except maybe high-level athletes, ballerinas, bodybuilders, etc.) actually needs. It’s really pathetic.

“But Mith, my body feels great when I lift weights and proteinmaxx and drink my weird little fitness smoothies and count macros and–” OK cool! great! You do you. But let’s stop telling everyone they need to do all of this, because all of this is not normal. And it’s not necessary.

Most people feel just fine eating a normal (i.e. not an Instagram influencer’s) diet, at a normal (i.e. not a runway model’s) size, exercising a normal (i.e. not what Big Gym tells you is “normal”) amount. Sure: maybe they’d have a bit more energy if they lifted weights and proteinmaxxed and etc., but would that boost really be significant enough to be worth the sacrifice of your precious free time, of making it a whole obsession, as if your life depends on it?

That’s not health. Health is about so much more than how skinny you are and how much weight you can lift.

All these greedy vendors trying to get our attention with alluring images of this extreme, exaggerated, unrealistic ideal of “Health” – it’s all a lie.

It’s like if they tried to tell us we’re not really “eating food” unless we’re eating Wagyu beef steaks and caviar every single day. “Don’t have these? You have nothing to eat! You’re literally starving!” Or if they tried to tell us we’re not really “driving a car” unless we’re in a Lamborghini. Or if they tried to tell us we don’t really “live in a house” unless that house is 5,000 square feet and outfitted with all the trendiest finishes and the latest energy-efficient amenities. “Anything less is simply not a house! You’re literally homeless!” See how absurd that is? This is how stupid you look when you call someone like Ashley Graham “unhealthy” because she has visible fat on her body instead of just pure rock-hard muscle and bone.

People make so much money off of telling us we’re not good enough and we should hate our bodies. Don’t even get me started on the anti-aging industry.

I know that for some of you this is old news – you’ve been trying to tell us for years! But it’s really only just sinking in for me now, now that I’m 36 and long past the age of any hope of sexual desirability by conventional standards. I begin to see it now: neither you nor I will ever be “healthy” nor “pretty” enough.

I’m realizing how true it is that, by these modern standards that we idolize, no one will ever be healthy enough – and anything perceived as “unhealthy,” any deviation from this strict standard, is cast as a moral failing!

It really is a religion, for so many people! The analogy is plain to see. How did we get like this?

This health cult is a societal disease in itself!

I’m no expert, but if I had to guess, I think this disease is the result of (1) our Godlessnes as a society — our lack of an actual, real religion, and (2) our fast-paced post-industrial world, in which everyone’s expected to chase dollars and sell things and appeal to the masses, and (3) the modern media: the internet and social media, of course, but before that there were magazines and TV and tabloids and all.

The most important of these factors is (1), because it’s our Godlessness that leads us to fall into the traps of (2) and (3).

And also, because living without any real religion leads us to have an inordinate fear of death.

We’re deeply horrified by the vulnerability of our bodies. We refuse to accept that they are dust and to dust they shall return, sooner rather than later. We’ll kick and scream and do whatever we can to try and wrestle against that truth, to lengthen this earthly life, because we believe it’s all we have and when this is done, it’s done: curtains, lights out, party’s over.

That’s not a healthy perception of life and death. Our bodies, even the ones that are celebrated as so “fit” and “sexy” and “healthy,” are vulnerable! We’re all susceptible to disease and death, and no amount of time spent in the gym, no step count nor perfect macros, can change that.

Case in point: I once worked with this girl, an absolutely lovely girl, really smart and funny and fun to hangout with, a hard worker and a really likeable social butterfly, who also happened to be ridiculously hot: petite and tiny, super “fit,” maybe ninety pounds soaking wet, she looked like an Instagram model, and indeed, she was a former competitive cheerleader, so her body looked about as close to “perfect” as can be, by today’s conventional standards. All the men in the workplace fawned over her. And of course a part of me envied her body.

— That is, until I got to know her a bit better, and learned that she was being treated for a persistent cancer: colorectal cancer, in fact, which gave her all kinds of gory symptoms and painful trips to the bathroom and sometimes gave her uncontrollable diarrhea (she often laughed with us coworkers about these incidents, including an anecdote about shitting herself in a grocery store once; I guess if you can’t laugh, all you can do is cry). She’d gone through chemo before, and was getting ready to do it again soon. And shortly after we fell out of touch, I learned through the grapevine that this cancer, and its treatments, had caused her to tragically lose a pregnancy late in the second trimester.

Needless to say I no longer envied her body. I just felt bad for her. I’d rather have my sturdy, unsexy, healthy body any day than her beautiful sick one!

See? If you saw her on the street, you’d look at this petite girl and go “wow! She’s so healthy!” But she was actually not healthy at all!

So what is this idea of health? It’s a false idol, is what it is, and we’re all fools, enslaved by it.

Sure, being overweight is generally bad. I’m not one of those “health at any size,” “body-positive” advocates. That’s silly. Being too big is bad for your health, and if you are obese, you need a lifestyle change. That’s a simple truth.

But let’s not conflate that with “anyone with any visible fat on their body is a failure and a loser and deserves to be scorned and shunned” – to be excommunicated, if you will, from this Church of Health and Fitness.

It’s idol worship. It’s futile, it’s pathetic, and if you’ve fallen for it, I’m sorry, and if you’re out there perpetuating it, I’m embarrassed for you.

Let’s do better. Let’s return to the one true religion — or at the very least, let’s open our eyes and climb up out of this Plato’s cave that we’re trapped in.

Because living like this, worshipping this ridiculous extreme, offering it the bloody sacrifice of our hard-earned money, our limited time, our very self-worth – it’s not good. It isn’t (wait for it!:) healthy.