When Did Being Proud Of Your Physique Become A Crime?

If you’re a fitness content creator selling a course, a fitness plan, or just providing general advice, people need a way to discern the bad actors with misinformation from the good ones, just as you would with any other results-driven industry.

You probably wouldn’t get a cosmetic procedure done by a doctor with no testimonials, no reviews, no proven track record of producing the results you want, and, likewise, fitness creators know that their biggest selling point is modeling the physique their followers covet. For fitness creators, their bodies are their testimonials. It’s a no-brainer, then, that creators who are gym rats or give dietary advice often start their videos with a “body check” to show you the body that their lifestyle has produced.

“Body checking,” so long as it isn’t clinically debilitating, is just neutral information. But the anti-diet community, composed of hall-monitor dietitians and eating-disorder-recovery scolds, treats all body checking as the debilitating obsessive-compulsive behavior found in people struggling with body dysmorphia and eating disorders.

Now, merely starting a video with your body in the frame is considered “body checking” and is passionately policed by keyboard warriors, dutifully cataloging fitness creators as either “problematic” or “positive role models.”

Clinically, body checking describes repetitive reassurance-seeking behaviors like mirror inspections, skin pinching, constant comparisons to other people, frequent weigh-ins, wrapping their hands around their limbs, measuring their body parts, repeatedly assessing the fit of certain clothing, and asking for reassurance from others about their weight. If it’s an obsessive compulsion that is used to reduce anxiety, impairs functioning, and is associated with reassurance-seeking or punishment rather than neutral feedback, then that’s indicative of an unhealthy behavior you should seek help for.

But now, merely starting a video with your body in the frame is considered “body checking” and is passionately policed by keyboard warriors, dutifully cataloging fitness creators as either “problematic” or “positive role models.” You can probably guess which is which: the problematic creators proudly display their bodies as ornaments to be manipulated, while the positive role models are those who discuss fitness without showing or fixating on their physiques.

A recent What I Eat in a Day post by Abbey Sharp opened with a shot of her from the chest up, filming her introduction, before documenting a series of healthy, balanced meals. This direction is designed to be inclusive for people healing from past restriction. The top comment, “Love that this doesn’t start with a body check!” is to be expected on this side of the internet, where the content is tailor-made for people healing their relationship with food after a past of over-restricting food and over-policing their bodies.

What I don’t appreciate is the encroachment of this attitude onto the broader internet, where people insist on policing everyone else’s relationship with food and their own bodies. All too often, a well-meaning, wholesome fitness creator whose content can hardly be described as toxic is unfairly demonized and has their body image questioned for not living completely divorced from their physical form. Not only is this an unreasonable expectation for society to cater to your specific triggers, but it surely cannot be a healthy mindset.

Even if this approach is a stepping stone to healing from an eating disorder, the end goal surely must be to lead a normal life, no? To not feel compelled to police other people’s behavior and spiral at the sight of someone fit and healthy? If eating-disorder recovery never prepares you for contact with a fit woman without unraveling, maybe this so-called recovery is fundamentally flawed.

YouTube and TikTok are now saturated with “body-checking” police who want to make being proud of your physicality socially unacceptable.

It doesn’t seem like these people are being rehabilitated so much as permanently psychologically handicapped. I’ll grant they heal the restriction aspect of their disorder, but then they seem to reorient this restriction mindset onto all of the rest of us: “don’t do this, don’t say that, don’t promote this, I can’t be around this.”

YouTube and TikTok are now saturated with “body-checking” police who want to make being proud of your physicality socially unacceptable. Creators who include a quick physique shot at the start of their videos often feel compelled to defuse criticism with sardonic displays of self-awareness, calling out “body checking!” themselves, as if preemptive irony will spare them judgment.

But body checking isn’t even the right term for what they’re doing. The kind of “physique check” you see from creators like Freelee the Banana Girl, who might open a video in a crop top displaying her flat stomach while explaining her raw vegan diet, isn’t compulsive behavior; it’s simply relevant to her content. She’s making the case that eating like she does will cause you to look like her.

Whether that’s true or not is a separate issue. She’s clearly not performing body checking in the strict sense used in psychological literature. She’s not anxiously seeking reassurance for intrusive thoughts about her body image; she’s proud of the way she looks as a forty-five-year-old woman who’s been eating a fruit-based vegan diet for more than eighteen years. Her enviable lean body as a woman no longer in her 20s is a form of activism—of results that speak for themselves, not disorder.

What’s happening here is semantic drift. Niche communities like eating disorder recovery develop a term for a very specific behavior, and being able to name this behavior makes them feel a sense of freedom from it. But then these terms break containment from the isolated community they were meant to apply to and colonize mainstream social media, taking up space where they don’t even apply.

There are exceptions. Some creators with histories of disordered eating, like Eugenia Cooney, have been accused of using the camera lens to engage in the truly compulsive variety of body checking, and that seems plausible from her unnatural movements, angles, and strange choices of what to highlight in videos ostensibly about products barely in view, in addition to the contextual elephant in the room.

Actual body-checking compulsions in these content creation scenarios can look like holding up your leg a certain way to check for slimness or if bones are protruding, posing at certain angles to check for the protrusion of the collarbones, seeing how small your wrists look in your hands, or how clothes fit on your frame at certain angles. It does appear that Cooney engages in this kind of behavior, and the healthiest thing you can do is simply not watch and hope she gets real help.

That behavior is entirely different from what the overwhelming majority of creators are doing: displaying results, satisfaction, and pride. We need to be precise with our language because it dilutes the significance of these terms and conflates the seriousness of true disorder with a display of earned confidence—showing the fruits of discipline and effort.

Body checking in the clinically significant sense, as an eating disorder comorbidity, can rob you of years of your life. Little moments of joy and sanity you take for granted can become obscured by the tunnel vision of hyper-fixation. I can understand why those who’ve been there before are hypersensitive to the threat of its slow creep in lifestyle content, but I dare suggest this sensitivity isn’t properly calibrated. It’s okay—and yes, even healthy—to take pride in your physique.

I’m not buying the reasoning that the only reason people oppose these body shots is because they imply that if you eat like them, you’ll look like them, and that prescriptive mindset is toxic. Toxic to whom? To you? A healthy, fit body being shown off is toxic, as opposed to what? If you read any articles on the social media body checking phenomenon, they ask you to dispel your notions of fatphobia, to decenter beauty and thinness, and remember that fit checks should be about the clothes, not the bodies wearing them. But we are our bodies.

People need to become more in tune with their bodies, not more divorced from them.

What does it say about a movement so steeped in visceral self-hatred that they wish they could dissolve their “meat shells,” I assume they’d call them, rather than the container for the soul, and ascend beyond them? They even refer to a goal of “body liberation.” Whatever this “well-meaning” delusion is, I couldn’t be more against it. We don’t live in a diet culture that I’m constantly hearing about, but with an unacceptable obesity rate, we could certainly use it.

People need to become more in tune with their bodies, not more divorced from them. And part of that solution is aspirational content that sells you self-improvement, personal responsibility, longevity, and beauty. Not the ugliness of fat acceptance that asks us not even to stay as we are, but to devolve into something much worse.

The more content I see like that, the more I understand why we’re in a spiritual crisis of hopelessness—why people no longer believe in the American Dream, or in anything at all. Mastering your own body is the first step to mastering the world.