#idr ever craving healthy food before that. when i get cravings it's normally just for burgers and cheese fries

[fleshadept]

i've recently started swimming and as a heavier person with joint problems it is the first kind of exercise i can not only tolerate, but really enjoy!! even though i just swim laps. i found a swimsuit i really love for the first time in my life, from beefcake swimwear that makes nice one-piece swimsuits in a vintage style with short leg pieces so it's very gender neutral and fits my body well.

swimming has really been life-changing for me. i can't do impact sports like jogging because of my knees, and in most types of exercise i feel so heavy and my body feels unwieldy and i feel so watched and judged because it seems so obvious how out of shape i am, and it used to just depress me. but with swimming i feel weightless, no one can see you well underwater anyway, it doesn't trigger my asthma as easily because of the humidity, it's not as sweaty and uncomfortable, and it's amazing for my joints. it's a form of exercise i really think everyone who struggles with most conventional exercises should look into. it works the whole body and most of the strokes are pretty straightforward.

it's helped my joints feel better, it's helped my back since i work a desk job, it's made me generally feel better mood-wise because people really aren't lying when they say exercise makes you happy. and even though i'm also normally the only afab person there who doesn't shave, people tend to stick to their own in lap pools and most of the time you can't even tell if someone's staring because you're focused on your own exercise. it's really really nice.

It's honestly such a shame that we've made such a huge thing out of swimming and swimsuits and looking good in swimsuits and fat people not looking good in swimsuits. Swimming is actually the perfect exercise for fat people because it puts zero pressure on the joints, which is a much bigger concern for us than it is for skinny people, and lets you exercise basically every muscle group without straining too much and risking injury. Yet somehow this is one of the least accessible exercises to fat people due to nothing more than a culture of body shaming. The work to unlearn all the shame to be comfortable in a bathing suit in front of strangers is huge even for conventionally attractive people, but I could probably count on one hand the number of fat people I've met who were confident enough to get in a bathing suit and go swimming in public.

And what is the exercise that somehow everyone thinks they should do instead? Jogging. It's more accessible, sure, it's easy and costs nothing to go outside and run. But I need you to understand telling a fat person to go running is basically telling them to go destroy their knees. Not to mention it's probably one of the most physically uncomfortable exercises to do when you have a body that jiggles even with compression garments.

Imagine a world where everyone had the ability and equal access to whatever exercise fit them best and helped them be happy and healthiest. Imagine a world where fat people go swimming.