Mainstream fitness culture often sells itself as empowering. But dig just a little beneath the surface, and it becomes clear how much of it is built on control, shame, and exclusion.
The messages are everywhere: Earn your food. No excuses. Summer bodies. Sweat is your fat crying. (I could hardly bare to write those phrases).
These slogans are often packaged as motivation, but really, they reinforce discipline over joy, aesthetics over autonomy, and performance over care.
What if fitness didn’t have to look—or feel—this way?
This week on the podcast, I’m joined by Ilya Parker, the founder of Decolonizing Fitness—an online educational resource and community that challenges the norms of toxic fitness culture and offers a radically different path forward. Their work centers the people most often pushed to the margins of movement spaces: fat folks, Black and Indigenous people, people of color, queer and trans folks, folks with disabilities and chronic illnesses, those who are over 65, and anyone who's been made to feel like they don’t belong in the gym—or in their own body.
This conversation is hard to put into bullet points, but here is an attempt:
Ilya’s early experiences with gender transition and fitness culture
How systems like white supremacy, ableism, and capitalism shape the way fitness is taught and practiced
The ways weight stigma and anti-fat bias cause harm in fitness spaces
How to find safety beyond pursuing body ideals associated with masculinity and femininity
What “decolonizing” movement really looks like—and why it’s more than just inclusive language
I know what it’s like to question the values behind traditional fitness spaces. I also know how hard it is to reclaim movement on your own terms — searching for models rooted in justice, community, and care.
What Ilya has created isn’t about perfection or performance. It’s about building a world where movement isn’t transactional, where rest is respected, and where all bodies are treated with dignity—regardless of shape, size, age, gender, race, or ability.
This episode is about imagining something different: a vision of fitness that prioritizes compassion, accessibility, and liberation.
And I promise, it will reach the deepest parts of you, cut through the lies and the noise, and leave you feeling more in your body than when you hit play.
Gentle reminder to hit that “like” button, leave a comment, and / or share this post if you enjoyed it. It’s for the Substack algorithm — I’m not just being annoying, I promise. It truly helps support the show and this newsletter, so thank you! xo
Reflections for you, for all of us:
How has your relationship with fitness or wellness changed over time?
If you could design a fitness space or culture that truly supported all bodies, what would it feel like?
Where have you found community or support in movement outside of mainstream fitness?
