It gets better. (It gets better.) It gets better. We'll get better.

For roughly the past seven years, I've been One of Those People Who Goes to the Gym, a fact that still manages to shock me every now and again when I remember that, when I was 11 years old, I faked having asthma in order to get out of running the mile in gym class. Today, exercise has become a big enough part of my regular routine that when I move into a new apartment, I acquire a new gym membership at roughly the same time I set up my gas hook-up and Internet connection. I've been doing it long enough that it's hard for me to explain exactly what compels me to go. To give me a break from my otherwise sedentary day? For health and longevity? To have a place to shower on the off chance the water heater in my apartment ever breaks? Who knows? I go to the gym. I enjoy it most of the time. I recommend it to others.

Of course, other People Who Go to the Gym know that it's inaccurate for me to simply label myself as a Person Who Goes to the Gym, for among us there are various and sundry oddly specific subtypes. Like any ecosystem, the gym is a place that thrives on the existence of many different species cohabiting in the same general environment. There are (for example) the already-ripped guys who only lift weights, wear sleeveless shirts, listen to loud music, and make startling clanking noises with their weight bars at the end of their sets. There are the elderly people who join the gym solely so they can walk slowly on the treadmill for 30 minutes and then use the steam room, if available. There are the women who go to the gym with their friends for the yoga and spin classes. There are the frighteningly tight-bodied people of either sex who are seemingly always running marathon distances on the treadmill while wearing expensive-looking athleticwear. There are the less amped-up, routine-minded people who pretty much only use the ellipticals. (I belong in this last category.)

Oddly enough, there's another glaringly obvious "subtype" of people who, over the years, I've only rarely seen in the gym -- namely, overweight or obese people. I've been a member at Cardinal Fitness, LA Fitness, the YMCA, Cheetah Gym, and the Beacon Hill Athletic Club (not to mention multiple visits to XSport, Lifetime, and Bally), and at none of those gyms do I recall the percentage of visibly overweight people topping 20%, or even 10% or sometimes 5%, of the overall exercising population. My other gym-going friends can probably back me up on this -- People Who Go to the Gym are generally people who are already healthy or almost-healthy, not the Marshmallow-Americans who are at the greatest risk for diabetes and heart attacks.

There's a "duh" factor involved in this observation. After all, if obese people were among the People Who Go to the Gym, they probably wouldn't be obese, would they? Obese people are obese because they don't exercise or eat well. I shouldn't expect to see them at my gym. Or, if they ever do start coming to the gym, according to this logic, I should endeavor to catch glimpses them quickly, like I would a glorious rainbow, before they slim down and become just another average gym-goer.

But seriously, statistically speaking, most of the people around me are overweight or obese (60% of individuals are overweight, 23% obese, in my own state of Massachusetts, which is one of the healthier states in the nation), and it takes a long time for even dedicated individuals to get weight off, if you trust the CDC's assertion that healthy weight loss involves shedding one to two pounds per week. From this standpoint, either all the obese people joined my gym at some point in the past and collectively lost weight with remarkable [and probably deadly] rapidity, or overweight people simply haven't been joining my gym. The second possibility seems far more likely. For although gyms are intended to help already-health-conscious people stay healthy while also helping not-currently-healthy people become healthy, every gym that I've ever joined has only really been good at the former half of that equation, and has appeared to suck pretty majorly at the latter.

It's easy to blame overweight people themselves for this phenomenon. They're adults, and they can join a gym if they want to.* Plenty of us manage to go to the gym regularly, so why can't they? If overweight or obese people stop coming or refuse to join gyms, it must be the result of a personal failing and/or their own lack of willpower, right?

And there is admittedly a nugget of truth in that [totally insulting] conclusion (since life choices and environmental factors are significant predictors of obesity), but the debatable veracity of that sentiment shouldn't blind us to the fact that shaming-and-blaming impulses rarely go very far towards solving any problem, and that it is indeed a problem, not a law of nature, that overweight people who could really benefit from gyms are often the ones most repulsed by gyms. Arrogant gym-goers need to take a serious look at what they, fortunate hard-bodies that they are, are doing to make Marshmallow-Americans feel unwelcome at the gym. Plenty of overweight people cancel their gym memberships, not because they lack the desire or self-control to keep working out, but because they feel judged and rejected by the in-shape lifers who "belong" in the gym and who sometimes actively avoid helping the newbies feel comfortable or accepted. There's a reason that "no-judgment" gyms like Curves and Planet Fitness have cropped up in the past few years, and it's a bummer that they need to exist at all.

To wit -- if you're one of the many fitness-crazed people I know who have been groaning and moaning for the past two weeks about the "resolutioners" who are crowding "your" gym and disrupting your usual routine: I fear you are a bully, and firmly believe that the "resolutioners" deserve to be in that gym more than you do. We all need to do our part, however small or tedious, to make the gym a friendly place. It's certainly not too much to ask that we avoid making each other feel ashamed for simply trying to get in shape.


* By the way, it should be obvious at this point that when I'm writing this blog I'm thinking about middle- to upper-class people (fat and skinny alike) who have the discretionary income to join gyms and the available time to work out in them. This is worth noting, since I'm throwing words like overweight and obesity around pretty casually, and poverty, food deserts, the stress of being part of the working poor, etc., play a huge role in the obesity epidemic. For individuals burdened by poverty, "hey, go join a gym" is usually hardly an appropriate suggestion for getting healthier.