Let’s talk health and fitness, Gen X style!
I’d venture to say that we were the first generation that working out became a thing you did. An activity for the betterment of not your mind or spirit. No this was strictly about your body. For me the barometer of what constitutes an activity is if there is an outfit specifically for it. Prior to the Eighties, there was no true outfit for exercising. We’ve all seen the pictures of women in the fifties and sixties in their pedal pushers and collared shirts on those Walton Belt Vibrators designed to jiggle the fat off. (Ignoring the fact that those women really stayed slim because they drank coffee and smoked cigarettes all day. Oh, and their soda contained actual cocaine…)
And don’t come at me with your basic shorts and t-shirts. I’m talking about outfits-statement outfits.
I’m talking leotards in bright shiny colors. Matching headbands. Not the kind that kept sweat or hair out of our eyes silly! Bright colored rope like headbands that we wore around our foreheads, UNDER our bangs.
And of course, legwarmers.
Leg warmers kept our ankles nice and toasty, which was vitally important for good physical fitness. You wouldn’t want to strain something in your shin while you were hitting the gym.
Or, more likely the rec room in your basement. Because that is where real fitness was born. This was pre-VHS days. Pre-cassette tape days.
That’s right, friends.
The original workout at home medium was record album.
Jane Fonda to be exact.
I remember so vividly doing this with my friends and someone having to get up off the floor, because we were doing leg lifts, and flip the album over. The baby ran ninety minutes, and it was nothing but the latest hits and Jane Fonda’s melodic voice counting out the reps.
This of course was just the beginning of at home workouts, and when the VCR became cheap enough for all to afford, it was just the vehicle we needed.
Of course, Jane came out with a video version of her workout.
And then we were Sweating to the Oldies with Richard Simmons (hello short-shorts!) That dude had enthusiasm for DAYS!
And though we all craved the sort of gym where Olivia Newton-John got physical, nothing like that was available in my small town. And we weren’t about to be seen out for a run that wasn’t part of the aforementioned President’s Physical Fitness Test. (Yep, still not over that.)
Did we have things like Gatorade and protein shakes. No, no we did not.
We were a generation who learned about the food pyramid and followed that sucker like it was law. We learned about it in health class, in science class, in home ec. class. Three classes-that’s how important it was. It was drilled into our very DNA. Between that, and the constant reminder that by leaving any food on your plate you were was somehow personally causing children in China to starve, actually dieting was a huge mental hurdle.
But the diet industry did it.
First, they replaced our beloved Kool-Aid with Crystal Light. Which tasted like watery pink chemicals, frankly. But it was zero sugar! And zero calorie! I’m going to be honest, I didn’t even know what a calorie was until I was supposed to start counting them. And as has been documented here, I was never all that good at math.
Then they introduced the diet sodas: TAB, diet Rite, Fresca. These weren’t just diet versions of the sodas we loved, they were their only brand. There was no full sugar version of TAB. Only the one chock full of aspartame.
From there it was a straight dive into actual diet programs, eating regiments that could be found in the pages of our beloved periodical: Seventeen Magazine.
Seventeen magazine introduced us to the cabbage soup diet (not ideal for a teenage girl for obvious reasons). And the Grapefruit die (hard to do year-round when you live in the Midwest and there aren’t any grapefruits).
And then finally came Slim-fast.
“A shake for breakfast, a shake for lunch and then a sensible dinner! Give us a week, we’ll take off the weight!”
They weren’t pre-mixed back then. It was a powder that came in a canister. And back in the 80s there was no shaker bottle, nor had they figured out how to get the powder to dissolve so essentially you drank watery chocolate until you got to the sludge at the bottom that you ate with the spoon, you’d used try to mix the entire disgusting concoction with.
For that reason, sadly, I could not give Slim-fast the week they requested.
That was the end of diet foods for me. Until 1992, when Snackwells introduced the Devil’s Food cookie. I’m pretty sure those things were made with the cocaine our mother’s mother’s got to drink in their sodas. Not because they caused weight loss, but because we couldn’t stop eating them. One serving was two cookies. But only those with willpower could stop before eating the entire box…
Eventually they went the way of TAB and legwarmers. But I’ll always look back at them as they only diet food I ever loved.
Nowadays, we are about Macros and cross training. Somatic Yoga and intermittent fasting. It’s all so complicated. What I wouldn’t give to go back to the days of the Jane Fonda workout album, and having a friend who was always willing to jump up and flip it to side B.
That and a fully coordinated outfit.
Simpler times, friends. Simpler times.
Remember when Richard Simmons was on General Hospital? Soap characters in neon outfits just like you described! I remember Fresca fondly but don’t drink that kinda stuff anymore. Slim Fast gave me diarrhea!! 😳