There is a new weight-loss program being offered at the health club to which I belong. The program is called “Take it Off”, and the posters they’ve put up all around the club to advertise the program feature a photograph of a woman’s torso, cropped from midthigh at the bottom to just above her waist at the top. The torso is in profile, unbuttoned & partially lowered jeans with a white measuring tape wrapped around the waist. The body pictured, of course, is the sun tanned, flat-stomached, tiny waisted, firm-booty ideal of womanhood.

I got to the gym to feel good about myself, to feel healthy and strong and to have fun. When I’m there, I don’t want to see ads for weight-loss programs – which cost extra, above what they charge for membership – and especially not ads that are designed to prey on my insecurities about my body, ads which I find inherently degrading to women in that they use sexualized images of our body parts to make us feel bad about ourselves because we aren’t as sexy as the ass/hips/abs/waistline featured in the photo so we better sign up for some all-new deprivation techniques right now.

ARRRGGGHH.

Did you gain some pounds over the holidays? Sign up now to Take it Off! This time the offending ad is on the inside of the bathroom-stall door, right at my eye level as I sit on the toilet. I reach over and slide the full-color flyer out of its plexiglass holder, and dig around in my backpack. My trusty Sharpie is missing, but I do have a pen. So I lean the flyer up against the wall and right next to where it tells me to sign up to Take it Off! I write: Or Just Learn to Love Yourself the Way You Are. I slip the flyer back into its spot on the stall door and admire my work.

I wonder how many women just give up on health clubs/gyms because of these messages? How many times in a day do we have to be reminded of exactly how far short of the ideal we fall? Of how much work we need to do to make our bodies acceptable to society? My membership comes with a free 60 minute consultation with a personal trainer. I was excited about that, since I’ve never had the opportunity to work with a trainer. But when I read the bio’s for the club’s trainers, every single one mentioned something about weight-loss in their 5 sentence blurb. Exactly none of them said they focused on teaching clients how to enjoy being in their bodies, none of them mentioned HAES, none of them wrote about being accepting of larger bodies. This doesn’t make things easy for me – but I will call them all up and see what they have to say.

Before I go back to the club, I’ll also be printing up some stickers with body-positive messages on them, to be conveniently adhered to offensive weight-loss advertisments. I’m also thinking about making a proposal to the club that they start to have some info about HAES, and maybe some size-positive exercise classes. I’m thinking fat yoga would be a damn fine place to start – since the skinny yoga teacher wasn’t too good at helping me modify poses to accomidate my larger size – and then we could take it from there. Maybe a nutrition program for those of us who would like to learn about eating healthfully, without the focus on weight-loss.

Who knows what could happen? I just know that as a fat woman, the health club scares the crap out of me. And I’m sure I’m not the only one. I bet there are a lot of ways that the club could make us fat women feel more welcome (bigger towels, please?) and if we felt welcome we’d be more likely to join, and participate. And that is definietly a win-win situation.