Geschatte leestijd: 5 minutenDe Telegraaf headline on Wednesday “Six-pack craze causes concern.” A six-pack for women would be unnatural, and health blogs have a bad influence by presenting an unattainable ideal. “It’s never good enough,” I think. Have “we” saved women from bulimia and anorexia by at least letting them eat the right types and amounts of food for muscle mass, only to set the bar too high for others again.
Sixpack Unattainable for Women
Earlier, we wrote about the “Dad Bod.” This week it was about the six-pack in women. The six-pack is under fire. De Telegraaf stated on Wednesday that a six-pack in a woman is unnatural and hardly achievable [1]. All those blogs and Instagram accounts with toned women with a six-pack would create an unattainable ideal.
Do you remember when you had a poor result on a test at school and the whole class turned out to have failed? Then you found solace in each other. “If nobody passed, it wasn’t our fault. It was just an impossible task.” But then the best student in the class walks in and turns out to have scored a solid A. “How did you manage that?” Answer: “By always paying attention in class, doing my homework, and studying hard beforehand, of course.” Result: Everyone feels bad again about the failure. Half of them may think that there was more to gain by working harder, but most refuse to accept that it was possible. That best student is just a highly gifted genius who shouldn’t be compared to the rest. The truth lies somewhere in the middle. For some, it’s really unattainable no matter how much effort they put in, others simply don’t put in enough effort.
Maybe you can’t achieve a six-pack, but in your attempt to do so, you can lower your body fat percentage from 30% to 15%. If at that moment you know you’ve done everything within reason and can be happy with your result, there’s nothing wrong. A 7 is also a fine result; after all, we can’t all be highly gifted.
Unhealthy Ideal?
Eric van Furth finds it difficult to predict what the increasing gap between reality and ideal will do. “It is possible that the increasing attention to obesity, exercise, and health among women can contribute to the desire to be muscular.”
Fantastic! We’ve been saying for years that women should do more strength training instead of just cardio. Granted, people often thrive on extremes. People with obesity can find their way to healthy eating and exercise and go overboard. In the article about muscle dysmorphia, we described how eating disorders like bulimia and anorexia nervosa in some cases are replaced by the fitness lifestyle. It’s all about finding balance in everything.
But if you go overboard and your options are obesity, anorexia, or a bikini-fitness lifestyle, I know what I would choose if I were a woman. The whole attack on the six-pack like that by De Telegraaf is another example of going overboard: An unnuanced image where only negative effects are considered without looking at the positive sides.
For some women, a six-pack is not strange at all. They are naturally lean and, like the ectomorph in men, engage in strength training to develop more shape in the right places. Although they are exceptions, they are also portrayed in these articles as “unnaturally built women with an eating disorder”.
Anyway. I already consider it a huge improvement when women mention me as role models like Sandra Prikker and Silvana Joghi (image below) instead of an average undernourished fashion model. In fact, I have seen the whole ideal image of women change for some time now from the walking beanpole to a woman with a tight stomach, with buttocks and thighs. The models who suffered from anorexia mainly reminded us of images we know from concentration camps, while the fitness women mainly remind us of the superwomen in action movies and cartoons:
Powerful and beautiful.
Girl Power
By the way, it’s called a beauty ideal, but many women with six-packs are well aware that many, maybe even most, people don’t find a six-pack in a woman attractive at all. OK, sometimes this is said by the same people who failed a test and now say they don’t find a solid A a nice grade at all, but in many cases, it’s just really a matter of personal taste.
I also wonder to what extent it is purely motivated by a beauty ideal or a form of self-empowering. Simply setting yourself a challenge and achieving it is a fantastic feeling.
Hard Work? Nothing Wrong With That!
Esther van Etten, a member of the Dutch Association of Dietitians, regularly sees women in her Amsterdam practice who want a six-pack. “Then I explain that you have to train incredibly often and hard for that. Moreover, you have to stick to a strict diet and you also have to have a predisposition. Actually, it’s a full-time job. A waste of time, because 90 percent of the time, there’s a sweater over it.”
Yes, you will have to work extremely hard for it. So? Since when is having to work hard for something a waste? So what she’s actually saying is: “Yes, it’s possible depending on genetics. But you have to work so hard for it that it’s still unattainable.” It surprises me. Especially when I read her CV [2]. If you have so much experience working with (top) athletes, you know that there are plenty of people who can surpass themselves. People who are willing to work hard for their goal and make sacrifices that others are not motivated or capable of making. Does she also say to young Ajax players, “Give it up, to become a professional footballer you have to have a predisposition, train incredibly often and hard. A waste of time, because 90% of the time you’re not on the football field”?
“Also older women, by the way. I recently had someone of 39 who wanted a six-pack.”
I recently had someone of 54 in front of the camera. Mona Roijers, with a six-pack, participated in a competition again after twenty years. What was the excuse again?
You only know if you have a predisposition for something and whether you have to make disproportionately much effort for it when you actually try it. So you can only find balance when you try to figure out how often you can and should train and what you have to sacrifice in terms of nutrition. It’s a bit of a waste to give up before you even start.
More Knowledge About Nutrition
“The focus is on a very low body fat percentage, which sooner or later puts the body in a breakdown situation.”
Wrong: The focus is on a low body fat percentage and the right amount of muscle mass! Women with six-packs usually know much more about healthy nutrition than the average person, sometimes even more than a dietitian. So they know that they can’t just starve themselves. To maintain muscle mass in the right places (often especially legs, buttocks, and shoulders), the right nutrients are needed, such as protein, healthy fats, and (indeed often to a lesser extent) good sugars. An extremely low body fat percentage cannot be sustained continuously without compromising muscle mass. These women know that too. Those tight photos you see are often snapshots of when someone is at their driest. That period is then followed by a period of more food to let the body recover.
Conclusion
Let’s not go overboard. If the fitness hype is a response to the attention to obesity, I can only welcome that hype as a healthier alternative. Whether this is obsessive or unattainable depends on the effort you have to put in to achieve your goal. For some, this means training three times a week and paying reasonable attention to their diet, others would have to organize their whole lives around it and still not achieve the desired result.
Everyone should decide for themselves where the bar is.
References
- telegraaf.nl/premium/reportage/24084409/__Wasbord-rage_baart_zorgen__.html?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=facebookpage
- esthervanetten.nl/sportdietist.html
