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If you’ve listened to Maintenance Phase, the popular podcast by Michael Hobbes and Aubrey Gordon, you’re familiar with how rotten the promise of healthism has always been; in fact, it was in Gordon’s new book debunking myths about fat people that I most recently came across the term.

This view of exercise might be best understood as “healthism,” a term coined decades ago by sociologist Robert Crawford.

“The past few years have witnessed an exercise and running explosion,” Crawford wrote in a 1980 paper titled “Healthism and the Medicalization of Everyday Life,” pointing to the proliferation of health magazines, and “health themes” in newspapers.

And it's not just about us; a prevailing ideology of "Healthism" urges us to frame our personal inadequacies as a slight against the society that depends on us to remain healthy.

It’s a side effect of healthism.