When I first heard the saying “strong is the new skinny” I loved it, but since then, I’ve kind of grown to hate it. Let me explain.
Strong is strong. According to the Oxford dictionary, strong is “having the power to move heavy weights or perform other physically demanding tasks.” It describes a physical ability. Incidentally, it’s also a word I like to use interchangeably with awesome, but that’s another story altogether.
Skinny is skinny. According to the Oxford dictionary, skinny is “unattractively thin,” which is at odds with the Urban Dictionary definition of “something a lot of girls want to be. Otherwise known as perfection.” Either way, I think we can agree that skinny is used to describe a body composition or aesthetics, not that body’s physical abilities.
When I first heard the saying “strong is the new skinny,” I was pretty excited. I was thrilled that we were finally going to start celebrating bodies, and particularly women’s bodies, for what they could do rather than how they matched up against whatever ideal they were supposed to look like. Appreciating physical feats of strength rather than purely aesthetics seemed like such a healthy, and long overdue, approach. I had visions of women admiring one another for how many chin-ups they could do, or how much they could squat, rather than what size jeans they could squeeze their skinny-fat butt into (oops…did I say that?!). And perhaps finally the capabilities of our bodies would rein supreme, and we’d all start exercising, resting, and fuelling appropriately to support our amazing bodies.