It is an autumn evening and a group of women have assembled in a community centre in Essex, as others Zoom in from home. They have gathered to join fitness instructor Becky Scott, in one of her MissFits Workout sessions, aimed at helping plus-size people find empowerment through movement – although all body shapes are welcoIme. “I know people in much smaller bodies who wouldn’t feel comfortable standing at the front and doing what I do,” she says. “I’ve always enjoyed playing a role. The Becky that stands at the front of the class is Becky the fitness instructor.” The sessions involve easy-to-follow and uplifting aerobic routines, featuring imaginary glitter-throwing and squats.
Scott, 43, danced as a child, doing ballet, tap and jazz, until she stopped at the age of 15. “Everyone was going en pointe,” she explains, “and I thought: I’m never going to have a career – I’m not built to be a dancer. Why would I mess up my toes, ankles and knee joints for a hobby? So I gave it all up.”
It wasn’t until she had children that she began exercising again. “Initially, it was about controlling my weight in order to be a good role model as a parent. I started to think, after 20 years of yo-yo dieting, that it was me that was the problem, that I didn’t have the willpower. But then I heard of other people having the same experience, so I started to approach things in another way.” Scott began going to Zumba and before long was exercising four or five times a week. While she felt the benefits mentally and physically, she noticed that her body shape wasn’t really changing. She also got “really pissed off” with people coming up to her and saying, “Good for you!” or “Keep going!”
In 2019, Scott set up her own classes in Colchester. “I did the training and started with the idea that I would do it for a few months. If it didn’t work out I would go back to what I was doing before.” But they took off. “I’ve discovered I’m not alone in the way I feel about moving my body,” she says. When classes went online during Covid, the numbers of participants grew, people joining from as far away as Texas and Melbourne. The sessions are billed as “movement and exercise opportunities for people who don’t feel at home in the gym”.
Scott says she feels happy with her current fitness levels, and subscribes to the aim of “health at every size”. “There has been an awful lot of focus on weight-loss goals as a motivation to exercise, and that is not borne out in the research,” says Scott. “People in bigger bodies rarely become people in smaller bodies: about 5% manage it.” And yet, she says, “health outcomes can be improved through exercise regardless of the size of our body. So it is about focusing on other health and wellbeing goals – like getting outside, overcoming isolation and improving mental health – rather than waist size and weight.”
There are preconceptions around being overweight and unhealthy. Scott recalls going to the GP about a possible hernia. “The doctor said: ‘I don’t know if you’ve got a hernia or not, but we can’t operate because of your body size. Would you consider a gastric bypass?’ There are no health markers that suggest that I have any issues. I don’t have high blood pressure; I don’t have issues with my cardiovascular fitness; I’m not pre-diabetic; I don’t have knee or ankle pain. I’ve had two healthy pregnancies.” But there is this assumption of ill health, “because my BMI falls into the morbidly obese category”, Scott says. In January, a Lancet report signed by 75 medical organisations around the world called for a “radical overhaul” in diagnosing obesity: rather than going by an individual’s BMI, a metric the doctors described as “inadequate”, the distribution of fat around the body and whether it genuinely impacts on organ and bodily function should be prioritised.
Last year, Scott completed an MSc in sport and exercise psychology at the University of Essex, where she also has a day job managing a team in the business faculty. Her dissertation considered the “lived experiences of fat exercisers and non-exercisers”, with one participant commenting: “I notice a difference when I am physically active and when I’m not. It makes me feel better … even if during it, I hate it. Afterwards, I feel accomplished.”
In the past year, the conversation around body size has been dominated by weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic and Mounjaro, which promise to diminish body fat by dramatically reducing your appetite. Yet at the same time a growing number of prominent fitness influencers and amateur athletes are demonstrating that there are other ways to feel good about the body you inhabit that don’t involve forcibly shrinking it.
“My body will always be bigger, no matter how active I am,” says Scott. “But for me, moving my body is still totally worth it.”
The health implications of being “fat but fit” are frequently debated. A 2024 study from the University of Michigan found that long-term exercisers had “healthier” belly fat than people of the same body fat mass, weight and sex who were inactive. The study showed that in people who had exercised moderately to vigorously four times a week for at least two years, “the blood vessel content of their fat tissue was greater, there was less of a type of collagen that can interfere with metabolism, and they had fewer markers of inflammatory stress” than in those who did not exercise, says Dr Jeffrey Horowitz, professor of movement science at Michigan School of Kinesiology, who led the study. “This shows that exercise can modify tissue in ways that can ultimately improve health outcomes.”
“What is clear is that adipose [fat tissue] is so important for health,” says Horowitz. “It is very important for tissue to be effective in its ability to store fat, because if it doesn’t the fat will be stored in excess in organs like the liver and heart, which can cause a lot of health problems. Overeating leads us to store more and more fat, but if that tissue is healthy and has the capacity to store the extra energy, then that is great in the times when we do experience weight gain.”
Horowitz is clear that exercise alone is not the solution to better health. “I want to be cautious of the stigma associated with obesity – weight loss is one of the most difficult things for people to do. But for a person with obesity who has some health risks associated with it, losing weight almost always leads to the greatest health benefits. Exercise is probably second most important, followed by the type of food they are eating.”
Phillippa Diedrichs, a professor of psychology at the Centre for Appearance Research at the University of the West of England in Bristol, has mixed feelings about the term “fat but fit”. “I guess it is the ‘but’, because that highlights the negative connotations associated with being fat, whereas that is just a description and an adjective to describe a body shape,” she says. “But of course, in society, it has become laden with other negative connotations and stereotypes which are often untruthful. There is a widespread misconception that those two things can’t go together. In actual fact, there is a lot of evidence showing that you can be fat and fit when it comes to strength, mobility and cardiovascular health and a range of other health indicators, but unfortunately, weight and health often get conflated.”
There are still obvious health concerns associated with being overweight, despite engaging in physical activity. “It is a no-brainer that we should be encouraging people to exercise,” says Dr Ellen Fallows, a Northamptonshire GP and vice-president of the British Society of Lifestyle Medicine. Fallows advises patients to keep active, but says she feels “awful when I meet people who are spending hours at the gym and not losing any weight, and they’ve not had any support to change what they are eating, or in addressing other factors such as sleep and stress”.
In 2017, researchers at the University of Birmingham found that so-called “metabolically healthy obese” people had a 50% higher risk of coronary heart disease than those who were of normal weight. “Fat around our hips and breasts is OK, but it is organ fat – central obesity – that gives us tummy fat, and it acts as a hormone-producing organ and stimulates our immune system to be overactive,” says Fallows. “All the latest scientific theories around what is driving fatigue, autoimmune diseases, cancer rates and metabolic diseases is through this chronic inflammation.”
Being slim and inactive is not ideal, either, explains Fallows: “Slimness doesn’t necessarily equate to good health. This is particularly the case if you have lower levels of muscles compared to fat in your body. Muscles are critical not just for movement and strength but for producing chemicals that keep blood sugar, blood pressure and brain function healthy. For example, people with lower muscle mass are at a higher risk of dementia.” Signs of unhealthy quantities of internal fat include “fatigue and low mood, which is often associated with many factors that underlie poor metabolic health. You would also see high blood pressure and markers of blood inflammation on blood tests,” says Fallows. Some exercise is therefore essential for every shape and size of body.
Trina Nicole has just got back from Jamaica, where she held a fitness retreat. “The Caribbean is always where I have felt my most confident self just to exist and be free,” she says, adding that her family originates from Saint Lucia and Dominica. The 32-year-old dancer, model and fitness entrepreneur, who has starred in striking Nike campaigns, wasn’t always so self-assured. Nicole danced as a child and participated in a number of other sports, including swimming and football, but abandoned it all when she hit puberty.
“People sometimes assume a lot of my insecurities around my body were because I was bullied, being a bigger child,” she says. “But actually it was more because I was overly sexualised. I had big boobs and got a lot of unwanted attention from men, and that made me feel more self-conscious.
“Wearing a swimsuit that showed my figure, or running and not wearing a supportive enough bra so my boobs were jiggling up and down” was not an option. “So I stopped all my activities, things that I actually really enjoyed, and I didn’t start them again until into my adult years,” she says.
As with Scott, when Nicole tried to get back into fitness, aged 26, she had unpleasant experiences. “I’d get backhanded comments or people being shocked and saying: ‘For your size, you can dance.’” She started her own dance classes after feeling othered in such spaces, she says. Nicole never set out to make them plus-size focused, but when bigger women kept turning up, clearly thrilled to see an instructor who looked like them, the Curve Catwalk was born. The classes pop up around London and Manchester, with plans to expand. Nicole has danced on stage with Lizzo at Glastonbury – “that was so empowering, because all her dancers are plus-size” – and appeared in the video for Beyoncé’s Brown Skin Girl, but she says the community she has created around classes is her proudest achievement.
Nicole’s fitness regime is key to keeping everything in balance. “I am very active,” she says. As well as dancing, she skates, goes to the gym and walks a lot. “Of course, I want to be healthy. I think there are these stereotypes that if you are plus-size, you can’t want to be healthy. I feel like a very healthy person. And health is not just about the physical and how my body looks. It is also about mental health – and being active helps my overall wellbeing so much. I think that can sometimes be downplayed, which is really harmful.”
She is not immune to the pressures of diet culture. “When I first embarked on my fitness journey, it was definitely to make myself slimmer,” she says. “I’ve done crash diets that really affected my mental health and encouraged behaviours that aren’t healthy. I definitely had disordered eating for a long time. I don’t do those things now because it had such a negative impact on me. Focusing on healthy habits, staying active and practising self-care have been a lot more beneficial.”
In 2023, Rhian Cutter, a 35-year-old nurse from south Wales was a size 28. She had always been “the chubby, funny friend”, she says, but then she got “married, happy and complacent” and her weight gradually increased. After going to the doctor about fertility issues and being refused IVF on the grounds of her weight, she decided to travel to Turkey to have a gastric sleeve procedure – weight-loss surgery that makes the stomach smaller to reduce appetite.
Six months later, Cutter’s sister persuaded her to go to a local boot camp she had been attending at Peak Strength Gym in Aberdare. Cutter recalls being petrified when she arrived: “I was so nervous because I had never done anything like that before.” She received a warm welcome and felt instantly at home. On her second session she pulled a car across the car park using a rope.
The gym is run by the inspirational Sam Taylor and Sue Taylor-Franklin, who have won an impressive amount of silverware and titles between them; Taylor came second in the UK’s Strongest Woman competition last August. Cutter quickly got the lifting bug: “I’ve started doing deadlifts. My maximum is 125kg, which is just insane.” Her usual routine is two bootcamps and three or four other training sessions a week, all after a hard day’s work on the NHS ward she manages.
“I am completely different,” she says. “I am very focused. I am driven. I want to compete in strongwoman events. I’m not bothered about winning: it is just about competing and believing that I can actually do that. I can do something out of the norm.”
At her biggest, Cutter was constantly breathless and life was much harder. “I have lost around 58kg. In the gym, we lift 40kg sandbags. I don’t know how I was walking around carrying that extra weight. No wonder my joints were hurting and I couldn’t get up the stairs.”
She is currently a size 18. “I think everyone would like to be smaller, because that’s just what society says: normal is to be small. But as long as I feel comfortable in myself, then that is all that matters. I’ll never be a size eight or stick thin, but I’m happy with how I look. I can go shopping and buy clothes with no problem now.”
In 2022, Scottee, 39, an actor who is based in Manchester, had what “in the olden days we’d call a nervous breakdown”, he says. It lasted six months, during which time he was diagnosed as autistic. “I couldn’t really get out of bed. I had to leave the company I’d set up for over 10 years. I couldn’t make art.”
The one thing he found he could do was practise yoga, and he became fixated on it. Scottee had previously been introduced to Lucy B, an inclusive yoga teacher and movement specialist in London, and became an enthusiastic attender of her online classes. “I got it into my head that maybe there could be a world in which I did my teacher training,” says Scottee. “I didn’t say this to Lucy, but one day she said: ‘I think you want to be a teacher.’ And that made me think: ‘Oh, I’ve got to do this.’”
Once qualified, the first in-person yoga class he experienced was one he co-led with Lucy. His hugely successful online studio Wonkee began life last year. “I was keen to create a space that encompassed all of the ethics and politics that I’ve been working with in my career,” he explains. “There is a big drive on access. And by that I mean financial access, physical access, fat access, neurodivergent access. The way I teach is hopefully as inclusive as it can be to anybody who wants to give it a go. To allow those of us who are considered to be wonky, wobbly, weirdos to also be able to join in with this thing that actually, if we look at the science, would be more beneficial to us in all our wonkiness.”
After yoga, Scottee also took up running. “Yoga makes you engage with your physical body, which I love. Running does a slightly different thing for me. It makes me recognise the strength, power and agility of my body; that I can somehow go out for a run for a couple of hours, then stop my app and realise I’ve done 17 kilometres. As a heavy runner, that is a great distance.” He also works with a personal trainer “to avoid injury and to maintain my body, as somebody who uses it a lot as part of my job”.
Does he feel physically different? “Yes and no. I mean … plot twist, I’m still a fat person. You could run until the cows come home, but we need to stop telling people that fat loss is going to come from running for 10 minutes a day, if you are not looking at nutrition.” He also believes “we are at a critical point of recognising what body positivity, or body positivity liberation as I prefer it, is”.
He explains: “I don’t think a person’s success is based on whether they move. I often say at the end of my videos or classes: ‘It’s only running, it’s only yoga – if it isn’t your vibe, it isn’t your vibe.’ I’m not here to determine that people need to exercise, that to be a ‘good’ fat person is to be somebody that moves. Because I enjoy exercise, that doesn’t make me a better fat person than somebody who doesn’t.”
British veteran Chris Yates, from Seaham in County Durham, was 24 when an accident that damaged his back meant he had to leave the army. Yates went from being able to run a mile-and-a-half in nine minutes two seconds, after doing 60 seconds of press-ups and sit-ups, to being “in a really bad way” and putting on six stone. “Help for Heroes got me moving again,” he says, “through adaptable sports: wheelchair rugby, wheelchair basketball, and swimming. I also became an archery instructor.” But his body shape had changed, which Yates found hard to come to terms with. “The army culture is that fat is bad. It means you’re unfit. It means that you’re not very active and lazy.”
It wasn’t until Yates, now 40, met his partner in 2023 that he was able to change this mindset. “She has shown me there are different ways of measuring fitness,” he says. “It is not about your size. You can look at things like blood pressure, or strength.” He also acknowledges that size can be more of an issue for women. “A lot of people will say to me: ‘Oh, you’ve got a rugby-player build,’ and that’s a compliment for a man, not for a woman.” Yates, who no longer uses a wheelchair, says he hates treadmills and instead plays football and surfs with other veterans to get the exercise he needs.
His partner, Kim Stacey, 39, lives in Newcastle, and set up her online and in-person studio Body Image Fitness four years ago. The inspiration came from the soul-searching she did during lockdown about her own physique, after signing up for a gym’s transformation challenge, which left her “incredibly disordered, with very extreme eating and exercise habits. And then I realised that, actually, this isn’t healthy at all for me.” Taking part left her “incredibly fit, but my body hurt all the time. I got down to a size 10, but all the instructors there were like: ‘Keep going, you’re nearly there.’ I don’t think my body could get any smaller. I was the smallest I’d ever been, but I was also the unhealthiest.”
Stacey loves exercising and wanted to create a safe space for others to do so. “The fitness industry has got such a heavy focus on diet, to the point where it is ruining fitness for a lot of people. There are people who have dieted all their lives and are sick of it and just want to enjoy movement.”
When I catch up with my interviewees in spring, Cutter tells me she has taken part in her first strongwoman competition. Scottee has released a second series of his Self Help podcast and taken up bouldering. Trina Nicole is training Curve Catwalk instructors as demand increases, and Scott has opened a community fitness space. On Christmas Eve, Yates proposed to Stacey. She said yes, but won’t be worrying about unrealistic beauty standards for her wedding. “The pressure to look your best often translates to achieving the smallest version of yourself,” she says. “I’m not willing to sacrifice my mental and physical health to go back to being smaller. For my wedding day I want to look my best, but my best will involve a happy smile surrounded by the people I love, taking up all the space I deserve.”
