The Truth About the Fitness Industry
This past semester, I have been asked to think about various problems I see within my world and to present solutions to them. While I have never thought of myself as a problem-solver, I had to put on my thinking cap and wonder about how to best solve these problems.
I realized that I chose “wicked” problems based on things I was seeing in my own life, rather than looking into the outside world. In Creative Concepting (the last class I took for the College of Innovation and Design at Boise State University), my 12-year-old niece was struggling with her grades at her middle school. I decided that creating some form of subscription box, (“The Brain Box”, I called it), to help motivate her to plan out and do her homework.
For this class, Analytics for Design, I decided to choose a problem I was actively going through, fitness and nutrition insecurity. There is so much information out in the interwebs about different resources in the fitness industry. There is also the problem that I am a college student, and I do not make much money. The fitness industry promotes so many expensive products, memberships, subscriptions, and supplements that it can be really unaffordable. I was so caught up in trying to learn about things I “should” do (or take, or eat), that I was not actually doing it. I figured this was a common problem amongst people, so I decided to make that my “wicked” problem. My initial solution was to create a free fitness and nutrition resource bundle to provide quality information, without having to pay a million dollars for it.
The next step of my project was to find out if this was something people would actually be interested in. I decided to hypothesize that “I believe that people are not motivated to move their body or eat better because they do not have the knowledge or information to achieve it.” In order to find results, I had to design a survey with some key questions:
Do you go to a gym, workout, or do something to move your body more than twice a week? If yes, list your reason(s) why you do so. If not, list your reason(s) why you do not.
Do you think you have good time management skills?
It’s a Wednesday night and you’re getting ready to make dinner. What time is it? What do you make yourself?
These are the questions that I wanted to look into the most. The first question is simple, I wanted to know if people made time to move their bodies. The second question is about time management. This stems from my childhood and my mother always having me practice good time management. I figured if some people did not have good time management, then they would not make time to move their bodies. The third question is to see what people’s habits are. Depending on what time they make dinner would determine how their time management skills are.
The next step in this process was to design the survey and plan with the end in mind. I determined that if 75% of my audience says they workout more than twice a week and try to eat healthy, then my hypothesis is incorrect and I will abandon the idea of creating a free nutrition and fitness resource guide. If 75% of my audience does not do those things, then I would continue with my original solution.
The following is the link to the survey where you can see all the questions asked about fitness and nutrition.
Here is a link to the spreadsheet with all of the data from the survey.
I got an overwhelming amount of responses, from family and friends (thanks mom for sharing :))and from a few outsiders in a Survey Response Facebook group!
I was shocked when looking at the results. For some reason, I had always thought that moving your body and intentionally eating healthy was something that would be hard because of how expensive it can be. But if you look at the results, you can see how many people have goals they want to achieve and how they plan on doing it.
Below are some visual data points for you to view:
In my final question of the survey, I asked surveyors if they had any additional comments on the fitness and nutrition industry. I put the responses through sentiment analysis and found out that over half of my respondents had something negative to say about the fitness industry.
In response to the nagging questions I stated earlier, here is what I discovered:
When asked if they go to a gym, workout, or move their body more than twice a week, the majority of the respondents move their body in some way, shape or form. They either walk or stand a lot for their job, or they are an active person and participate in a variety of workouts (yoga, pilates, running, etc.)
For time management, I got a variety of answers (as seen from the word cluster above). Some think they have excellent time management and have a plan/schedule/calendar, others do not. The reason I asked this question relates back to my own life. My mother always emphasized the importance of time management and making time to do things you want, because, at the end of the day, you should be able to sit down and relax. I guessed that people with poor time management skills would not be as active as the others.
The food question was very interesting. My guess was that the later people ate, the more inactive they would be (due to lack of time management and/or forgetting to eat). Most people ate at an average time of 6 pm, with some outliers due to the nature of their job. A few respondents do not get off work until 10 p.m. and cannot eat before or after their shift.
My research found that around 75% of my audience said they workout more than twice a week and try to eat healthy. I knew that I had to abandon my idea on the fitness and nutrition resource guide. One comment from my survey stood out to me and helped inspire a better solution to my “wicked” problem.
“It’s very inaccessible to a lot of people and also charges a lot of money to enforce an unsustainable lifestyle for many people. Not everyone needs to be ripped with a 6-pack and yet the fitness industry will convince you that you do need that. Supplements are extremely expensive and not nearly as necessary for all people and all situations as the fitness industry makes them appear. The fitness industry is also a big proponent of diet culture that puts many people at risk of developing an eating disorder. I value my health and I’m willing to spend a little money in order to maintain it, but I don’t need to have 15% body fat, a 6-pack, a customized meal plan, and several supplements to achieve my (what I believe to be) sustainable goals.”
I have realized that people do not need more instruction on how they move their bodies. What needs to be normalized is loving our bodies where they are at in our lives. We do not need some bodybuilder to tell us we need to lift heavy in order to feel “fit”, we need to feel fit when we are walking a mile around the neighborhood or practicing yoga in our living rooms.
That is why I decided to shift my solution from more instruction about fitness to instruction about body positivity. There are so many levels of “fit” that are not shown off on the Internet or in the media. I believe that having some sort of group or workshop that focuses on exercising body positivity is what my surveyors would be more interested in.
Below is a sample flyer for a body positivity workshop:
Although this was my first initial solution to my wicked problem, there is a lot of room for improvement. I am open to other ideas and topics that surround body positivity.
We spend so much of our time and energy hating our bodies and trying to change them, that we do not appreciate what it does for us. Our body lets us taste the most delicious foods, lets us hug our family, lets us pet our dogs, and so much more. We can dance with it, we listen to music with it, WE DO SO MUCH!
If anyone has any ideas or would like to reach out about the data, feel free to reach out to me at ashleyjohnson79@u.boisestate.edu
