Why Is It Only Women Are Forced To Be Mediocre To Not Offend Other Women?

Meanwhile, genuinely orthorexic bodybuilders who perform extreme diets, take steroids, and give advice that would have dieticians and eating disorder recovery girlies shrieking are glaringly absent from this discourse. This leads me to wonder why the burden of representation is always placed on women. The frequency of social shaming of any female public figure’s eating and fitness habits is out of proportion to how problematic those habits genuinely are.

One of my favorite fitness YouTubers is Natacha Oceane. With a master’s degree in biophysics from the University College London, she was also pursuing a Ph.D. in mass spectrometry, which she ultimately dropped out of to start a YouTube channel. Referring to Oceane as a “fitness influencer” feels disrespectful and like it does her informative science-focused channel a disservice. With an educational background in biophysics and an understanding of how to read scientific papers, her channel is a mix of educational videos breaking down the science of fitness and diet, as well as her personal documentation of her fitness goals and achievements. 

Some of these achievements include coming second in an Ironman competition (a gnarly triathlon consisting of a 2.4-mile swim, followed by a 112-mile bicycle ride, and finishing with a marathon race) after only training for three months, running for 24 hours straight, making multiple ultramarathon attempts to run 100 miles on the back of an injury, training alongside Olympic athletes, and passing the U.S. Army, Navy Seals, and Marine fitness tests.

Upon first glance at her achievements, you can tell she’s extremely athletic. This unusual, if not exceptional, athleticism is used as grounds for criticism. As a channel that promotes intuitive eating, accessible functionally instructive videos for specific fitness, mobility, and athletic goals, as well as a significant amount of content dedicated to dispelling harmful, counterintuitive fitness myths, imagine my shock when I struck a goldmine of gossipy posts about her on Reddit. Reddit, of course, is a place where all reasonable discourse goes to die, and the subreddit these posts accumulated on is r/gymsnark, which should give you an idea of the maturity level we’re dealing with here.

Unreasonable Criticism

The first post that caught my eye was titled Natacha Oceane: Red Flags in “All About the Science,” which featured a particularly long list of grievances with the fitness personality. After a brief skimming of the post, I could get the gist, and the complaints were all too familiar. These complaints essentially boiled down to accusing Oceane of disguising an active eating disorder, promoting an unbalanced lifestyle that focuses on strenuous over-exercising, that her workouts are too difficult and inaccessible for regular people, and that she is too preoccupied with pushing herself past her limits. A number of other posts containing similar speculations and accusations were posted to the same subreddit, additionally accusing her of lying about her real diet and training routine to achieve her physique.

Oceane’s channel is anything but a disordered eating channel. She, like many women, has suffered from an eating disorder in the past, detailing this in a video seven years ago of how she was trapped in a cycle of restriction, binging, and over-exercising. She has numerous videos on her channel about how she stopped binge eating, how a preoccupation with fitness damaged her health for many years, and how she stopped restricting calories and transitioned into an intuitive eating lifestyle. Intuitive eating is a way of eating that relies on natural hunger and fullness cues rather than tracking calories or abiding by certain diets or feeding times. Though she doesn’t habitually track calories, she has done a few videos where she tracked her calories for a specific purpose to demonstrate a point in a video about calories and exercise. In these videos, she found that she tends to eat an average of 2,400 calories per day, and she trains with weights about four times per week. This is hardly starving herself or over-exercising, nor does she promote any sort of disordered relationship with food or exercise. 

She goes out of her way to break down the science of popular fitness myths.

To the contrary, she goes out of her way to break down the science of popular fitness myths like making an enemy out of carbs, the idea that you can out-exercise a bad diet, and other issues that make weight loss and fitness goals unnecessarily difficult when they need not be. And as far as her workouts being inaccessible or too difficult? Oceane has two types of videos: ones that are instructive and ones that are merely examples of her personal training. If you want accessible workouts, you could try one of her follow-along workouts on her channel or buy one of her programs. However, her documentation of her ultramarathon journey is not for her viewers to follow.

She has numerous “What I Eat in a Day” videos, showing what meals she eats as someone who doesn’t track calories, and videos on how she trains, which frequently change depending on her athletic goals at the time. Her “What I Eat in a Day” videos are very balanced, as she states she thrives on the 80/20 rule by eating 80% nutritious meals and 20% whatever she wants. Having also dealt with orthorexia in the past, she doesn’t label foods as “good” or “bad" and often does fitness and eating experiments to demonstrate this, such as only eating ultra-processed foods for a week, going low-carb for a week, eating an extra 1,000 calories a day for a week, and calorie burn challenges that demonstrate whether or not you can outburn a bad diet or which compare the calorie burning effect of strength training vs cardio. None of this is disordered or unusual, and they are very infrequent videos used to demonstrate a point about the importance of balance and a healthy mindset. Eating 1,000 extra calories per day for a week was a demonstration of how you can easily go off track for a holiday without stressing about how it will completely throw off all of your progress. 

The Consequences of Developing Eating Disorder Recovery Communities

Even dieticians like Abbey Sharp, who are guilty of often over-pathologizing the banal as “disordered,” have made multiple videos praising Oceane’s channel. In the first video Sharp ever made reviewing Oceane’s “What I Eat in a Day,” despite applauding her for having a great attitude toward food, exercise, and body image, she criticized her for still having some weight loss-related content on her channel, which she claims is something she should work on as an intuitive eater. This sentiment embodies the modern mentality that diet culture must be rejected fully and outrightly, even when it’s valid. Having a desire to lose weight or to achieve certain aesthetic goals is inherently bad and feeding into diet culture. Sharp posted another two videos reviewing her channel, where she had overwhelmingly positive things to say.

It was astounding to come across these posts written by people who seem to occupy entirely different worlds. Lots of these critics accused Oceane of having active body image issues and eating disorder struggles despite there being no signs of such issues in any of her content. They use examples that misrepresent the situation, such as claiming Oceane supposedly “cried because she couldn’t fit into a size six outfit” as evidence of their case. I watched the video, and she was just upset that she had her eyes on a special outfit for a long time. She finally bought it, but one component didn’t fit, so she had to return it. She explained she was emotional because she was on her period. At no point in this video is she upset about not being a size six. She even jokingly states before trying it on that she “hasn’t been a size six since she was 12 years old.”

Then, we have the overtraining allegation, which is the most prominent criticism. It’s important to note that Oceane has been on YouTube for many years, and her athletic interests have evolved over that time. While she usually maintains a focus on strength and weight training, she also veers into other domains of exercise like gymnastics, plyometrics, running, swimming, cycling, and calisthenics. When she isn’t explicitly training for a special race or athletic event, she maintains a moderate four-day-per-week strength routine. However, because Oceane is incredibly athletically inclined, she has taken on countless impressive athletic challenges, sometimes even training alongside Olympic athletes, to the point many would just outright refer to her as an athlete rather than a fitness influencer. 

To a normal person, Oceane’s persistence, resilience, and commitment would be inspirational, but to brainwashed members of anti-diet culture, she is “delusional.”

Recently, she has taken a greater interest in running – a hobby that has come under scrutiny by people who insist on living vicariously through others. Some were complaining Oceane was “getting too skinny” when she appeared slightly leaner in one of her videos, something Oceane attributed to being in the first week of her cycle. A poster on Reddit speculates that she must be lying about her diet and exercise and secretly overtraining or restricting because she is “down at least two sizes overall from years ago” and lost some muscle mass in her legs and a significant amount of fat prior to her running training. They claim that because she claimed to take a year off from working out due to a back injury, it’s impossible for her to still somehow be shredded, insisting no science supports this level of muscle memory while eating the way she claims to. This is a schizophrenic level of speculation about someone else’s body with zero evidence. Keep in mind these are the same types of people that insist you should never comment on a woman’s body.

Oceane, already boasting a significant amount of muscle, endurance, and running experience, decided she wanted to run a 100-mile ultramarathon, to the personal offense of countless women around the world. As someone who has previously focused the bulk of her content on weight training, this change in content may seem jarring to some people. However, she’s no stranger to endurance events, as she completed her first marathon within just three months of training and miraculously finished in second place and successfully ran for 24 hours straight a year ago. No, she did not advise her followers at home to do the same and stressed that she was being closely monitored the entire time and supported with constant fuel, water, and electrolytes. After releasing a few more running-focused videos, she set her sights on the 100-mile ultramarathon, but there was just one problem – she injured her ankle. However, she didn’t give up. She continued to train without running by focusing on cross-training like cycling and weight lifting with the permission of doctors and specialists who monitored her ankle. 

Eventually, she was cleared to run, but she unfortunately injured herself again as a result of trying to overcompensate for her ankle injury in her running stride, which only made things worse. She made the right decision to pull out of the race and took a break from posting for five months. However, she was still determined to achieve her goal and didn’t give up on it. Her return video revealed that she officially entered her first 100-mile ultramarathon and made her first attempt. After running about 82.5 miles for about 20 hours, she couldn’t go any longer. It had been raining for about 8 hours, leaving her unbearably freezing, soaking wet, and with waterlogged shoes that resulted in immersion foot syndrome. She was heartbroken to have failed three separate attempts at an ultramarathon and has since put this goal on hold. 

To a normal person, Oceane’s persistence, resilience, and commitment would be inspirational, but to brainwashed outspoken members of anti-diet culture, she is “delusional in thinking she’s superhuman.” So, is it only women who aren’t permitted to have lofty, challenging, and crazy goals? It certainly seems that way. What makes these people think they know how long it should take an experienced runner and in-shape triathlon athlete to achieve an ultramarathon distance?

The Double Standard, as Committed by Women

It’s never male models, fitness gurus, bodybuilders, or YouTuber laymen subjected to witch hunts over their eating and exercise habits, despite the fact they’re often much more disordered, extreme, and rife with potential to cause harm to the unsuspecting viewer. They are merely ignored, and quite frankly, I can’t say I think they need to be held responsible for grown adults’ decisions over their own bodies. What is strikingly obvious, however, is that no one is pressuring men to represent the ordinary, average man or made to feel ashamed for modeling outlier excellence. Women are expected to bathe in mediocrity lest we risk stoking feelings of jealousy or inferiority in other women, and this is true across all industries and backgrounds. Body positivity is encouraged in only one direction. 

This is in part due to the male inclination to go to extremes, often without feeling like it’s causing any unhealthy disruptions to their life. Tracking calories tends to be part and parcel of achieving their fitness goals of getting leaner or putting on more muscle. When they compare themselves to other men, it takes on a more aspirational tone than a burdensome one. But for women, this often results in a hyperfixation of whether or not they’re good enough. Do I look like her? If I don’t, I must be uglier and less worthy. This results in projection and overcompensation, usually as a sneaky manifestation of intrasexual competition, though they’ll certainly claim it’s out of an altruistic concern for female health and well-being. For men, if they don’t look like a certain aspirational bodybuilder, it’s merely something they can strive for. 

Women are expected to bathe in mediocrity lest we risk stoking feelings of jealousy or inferiority in other women, and this is true across all industries.

For women, however, not living up to the body ideal is a deeply soul-crushing experience and one that often results in bringing down the very women who model this “ideal” out of resentment. Men and women, after all, are not only socialized differently but are inherently physically and psychologically different. Men, of course, can and do develop body dysmorphia, eating disorders, and unhealthy relationships with food and exercise, but they are less pathologized to the extent that female eating disorders are. This tends to manifest through men as a “personal problem” or a “personal failure” rather than one that must be extrapolated onto broader society. When women deal with eating disorders, it’s never “I developed an unhealthy relationship with food, perhaps because I have body dysmorphia, OCD, trauma, or other sources of low self-esteem or lack of control.” No, that’s never how it goes. It’s always, “You did this to me.” Victoria’s Secret models make me feel bad about myself for being thin and beautiful. For that, I’ll accuse them of promoting unattainable beauty standards. What this really says is that women aren’t permitted to be exceptional. They can only model the ordinary, average, and mediocre. Men, by contrast, can post videos like “I Ran a Marathon With Zero Training” which is met with shock, awe, and praise. If a woman were to do the same, she would be torn apart, and by other women, no less.

Girls appear to be more heavily influenced by media and representation than boys, with a study finding that 75% of girls consider themselves “very or extremely influenced by TV and movies when it comes to how they look,” while only 45% of boys felt that way. This can explain why you see viral videos of little girls of color jumping for joy when they see a black Little Ariel much more often than a little boy thrilled to see a superhero who looks like him. Men are more inclined to identify with things and people who don’t necessarily look like them. But a biological explanation isn’t necessarily an excuse for questionable behavior. Demanding that others exemplify underwhelming ordinariness and remain complacent in their desires for achievement just so you can feel better about yourself is so lacking in dignity that I refuse to accept that this is as self-actualized as the female mind can become.

Closing Thoughts

The consequences of the early 2000s skinny revolution that marked an era full of body shaming women at perfectly normal weights, making them feel they only had value if they were as thin as possible, did its psychic damage on an entire generation of women. Admittedly, many of them suffered from eating disorders because of it. However, this has resulted in a deeply malicious pathology that seeks out problems where they don’t exist. Problematic social trends like the skinny revolution always create an equal and opposing countersignal movement that is often even more dogmatic and aggrieved. That has landed us here in our current predicament, where tracking calories or making lofty fitness goals can never be a healthy practice, no matter if they never cause any distress or unhealthy relationships with food for the participant. You are permitted to be “ordinary” but never anything more.

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