Why Must We Turn Hot Girl Walks into Diet Culture?

Photo by Arek Adeoye on Unsplash

I’m a hot girl walk girly. I love hot girl walks. I go on them every day. Even more now that I’m not currently strength training. It’s a sad story really – my perfect little gym went out of business and I'm heartbroken and still recovering. I truly miss strength training and am looking for a new gym because I’m a sad girl that misses strength training. But I hate commercial gyms and anything that takes more than 10 mins to get to on foot. 

Anyways, I have digressed. I promise this is not an article about my gym sob story, but also, please feel bad for me. It’s a tragedy really.

Back to the hot girl walks. 

I’ve noticed something really interesting happening on TikTok. Every other thing coming across my newsfeed are videos about women setting goals to walk 15K to 20K steps a day. 

Videos of women showing before and after pictures of their legs after 30 days of walking 20K step a day. 75 Hard challenges that are focused on walking 10K steps a day for 75 days. 

And here’s the thing: Walking is good for you. Some of the benefits of walking include:

• Improved mood 

• Reduced stress

• Increased melatonin levels which can lead to better sleep

• Great for heart health

• Can lead to increased levels of creativity 

• Improved mental clarity 

• Can lead to decreased instances of dementia 

• Lowers blood sugar levels 

• Reduces cortisol 

Plus a host of other benefits. But there’s one thing I didn’t add on that list: Burns calories. 

And that’s actually the thinly veiled message between the 15K to 20K girlys on TikTok. MUST LOSE WEIGHT.

And here’s an example:

Obviously, this video is outrageous for lots of reasons, one being that many people take Ozempic and other semaglutides because they have diabetes. You know the intended use of the medications. The thing that everyone seems to forget about since it’s been introduced for weight loss. 

But also, why must something as simple as walking be confiscated by diet culture? 

Your movement practice does not need to be tied to weight loss. 

The sudden obsession with walking is nothing but the next faze of toxic wellness culture. The girlys want to get thin again and walking is perfect alibi because instead of saying you’re participating in diet culture, you can say you’re just “getting healthy.” 

And that’s the thing about toxic wellness culture, it’s a slippery slope. You can disguise anything under the guise of “health” – disordered eating, excessive exercise, restrictive habits. 

The creator of the post was just brave enough to say the quiet part out loud. 

Remember the days when we were told we should all be aiming to walk 10K steps a day? Well, little did many of us know at the time, but it was all a marketing scam. 

The origins of the 10 thousand steps per day narrative goes back to 1965 when a Japanese company made a fitness tracker named Manpo-kei, which translates to “10,000 steps meter” and thus a marketing campaign began. Despite the fact that there is no scientific data to back this, it has become helplessly ingrained into our brains. 

However, actual research shows the following about the benefits of walking:

• Sedentary women averaged 2,700 steps a day.

• Women who averaged 4,400 daily steps had a 41% reduction in mortality.

• Mortality rates progressively improved before leveling off at approximately 7,500 steps per day.

• There were about nine fewer deaths per 1000 person in the most active group compared with the least active group.

So if avoiding death and being healthy is your actual concern, you reap all the benefits of walking at even less than 10K steps a day.

I’m sure there are people who will argue with me that the goal to walk 10K to 15K isn’t about weight loss for them. Okay, so would you keep doing it if you never lost any pounds or if you didn’t lean out as a result of it?

Also, walking 15K to 20K steps a day is easily 2 to 3 hours. Maybe you don’t have 2-3 hours a day to dedicate to walking or maybe you just don’t want to. I’m urging you not to put this kind of pressure on yourself. 

Also, this is a whole different topic altogether, but I still want to briefly mention it here. Walking isn’t accessible to anyone, and certainly, not 2700 steps, or 4400 steps, or 7500 steps. The reality is that as much as people would like us to believe that our ‘health’ and our health outcomes are solely within our control, it’s just not the truth. You can’t walk or healthy eat your way out of chronic illness or mortality. 

This article isn’t to discourage anyone from walking – from one hot girl walker to another –  but I do want us to be mindful of the way toxic wellness culture sneaks diet culture into every single thing. 

In theory, ‘wellness culture’ should make us feel ‘well’. However, in my personal experience, plus the experience of so many of the clients I used to work with, ‘wellness’ culture has left so many feeling exactly the opposite.

It’s left us with more body image issues than we started with. It’s left us with complicated relationships with food and exercise. It’s left us with less ability to trust our intuition when it comes to listening to our bodies.

Many of us came to fitness looking to get ‘healthy’ and unfortunately, along the way, the messages we receive are so confusing we no longer know what ‘health’ even looks like or means.

We started correlating ‘health’ with the size of our bodies, how much body fat we carry, how much weight we can lift, the number on the scale, how many calories we consumed, how many steps we walked today, how thin we could get and on and on and on.

Those don’t have to be the metrics you use to determine ‘health’ and walking doesn’t even have to be about your health. It could just because you enjoy it. Because it’s nice outside. Because it helps clear your thoughts. Because you enjoy being in nature.

Do you feel nourished, energized, and whole?  Are you enjoying your relationship with exercise and nutrition?  Can you eat food and/or skip workouts guilt free? Can you engage in fitness and wellness culture without feeling bad about your body?  Can you show yourself love and compassion? Do you understand how whole, complete, and unconditionally loved you are?

It’s hard to drown out the noise but I’m urging you to try or just to tune out from social media all together. The diet culture and toxic fitness culture noise is louder than ever, making it ever more difficult to shift our inner critic towards a voice of love, kindness, compassion, and liberation. 

I’m so passionate about this because I believe the more energy we spend focusing on shrinking ourselves and conforming to arbitrarily created standards of beauty, the less energy we have to focus on pursuing our passions and actually living our lives.

Life is short my love, do you really want to spend the rest of it falling for the lies of ‘wellness’ culture?

I hope you choose liberation.

Freedom from toxic fitness culture is possible. It takes ongoing work but it’s worth it.

So take a hot girl walk, but let it just be because you enjoy walking as a form of movement. Because it feels good. Because you want to do something kind for your body. 

And please please remember this - your movement practice does not need to be tied to weight loss. 

And finally, yes, I had to stitch that video and you can watch that below if you’re into that type of thing.