Fitness Politics

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Sometime during the first lockdown in 2020 I looked in the mirror and saw an overweight middle-aged man looking back at me. The weight gain must have happened gradually, but the recognition came suddenly. It was a shock because I had always been effortlessly skinny, and in my thirties would go to the gym to gain weight. My preliminary efforts to get back in shape by walking didn’t cut it, so I gritted my teeth and returned to the gym for the first time in eight years, struggling to lift weights much lighter than I had once been capable of. Gradually I returned to fitness, though my forty-nine-year-old body didn’t respond in the same way as it had in its thirties, my waist measurement remaining two inches wider than it had been for most of my life.