BETH DITTO ON BEING FAT, FIT AND NOT AFRAID OF THE GYM
Ididn’t entertain the idea of sport as a child: not because I hated sport, but because I hated the heat. I’m an indoor person; always have been. You want to know why? Because that’s where the air conditioning is – indoors. I hate the heat more than I hate tornados, and I’m deathly afraid of those – growing up in Tornado Alley in Arkansas was less than ideal. If there was ever a hint of dark cloud in a blue sky, I would freak out and refuse to leave the house. But the heat – that’s another level of hate.
My first and only ever series of exercise classes took place when I was four years old. In the Eighties, my mom and Aunt Janey used to go to the local leisure centre for aerobics classes, and I would tag along in my burgundy and pink hand-me-down leotard. I would go for it, harder than anyone else in the class. I would try to follow what the adults were doing, but I had ADD and I was four, so I actually had no idea what was going on – I would just dance like crazy in front of the mirror. I didn’t like being given instructions on how to do things; I still don’t. I like to do things my own way.
The culture around sports at school was jock-like, aggressive and sexist. My family didn’t have the money to indulge in team sports, but even if we had, I was told I wouldn’t be good at it – not by anyone in particular, but by the culture: fat kids aren’t meant to be good at sport, right?
Sometimes, I think that those who weren’t cut out for a life of running laps in PE lessons should just have been left alone. Let us draw, let us dance, let us play softball, but for the love of God do not make us run. The voices in my head – my mom struggling with her own weight, society, my teachers – made me believe I was too big to run, that the kids would laugh, that trying wasn’t even worth it because I wouldn’t be able to climb the hill and run the damn laps.
But I had a eureka moment, when it dawned on me that I liked what was happening: I was getting better at running, I was getting better at moving. PE wasn’t about me – no one was even looking at me – they were all just running
their own race. So I ran. I may have been at the back of the pack, running in socks, but I moved, and moving was good; moving made me feel fucking great.
Exercise – whether it was running, softball or balloon toss (throwing a balloon filled with water: I was Olympic-level good at that) – wasn’t about anything other than showing myself I could do something no one else thought I could do, and that made me competitive. I suddenly became the girl who muttered under her breath, ‘For the love of God, she’s batting again’ when we weren’t winning, or shouted ‘Goddamit, Becky’ when my classmate Becky Strand shied away from a pike in volleyball. I wanted to win.
I started going to the gym when I was a redhead, aged 28. I chronicle my life by the hair I had at the time. My dad had been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis in his forties, which ultimately rendered him wheelchair-bound. His illness had taken all his mobility away. I was pushing 30 and didn’t want the same fate as my dad; I wanted to keep moving, but, more importantly, I needed to if I wanted to continue performing on stage. Who wants rickety knees and cracking bones at 30?
So I got a personal trainer, but as soon as he started to boss me around, I stopped using him. I don’t like being told what to do. I don’t like being told what to wear, either, so I go to the gym looking like a frump. I’ll wear anything. None of this gym gear nonsense. I go in pyjama bottoms when they let me, but mostly anything scruffy-looking will do. I don’t wear make-up to the gym, I don’t even brush my hair – I brush my teeth, though; that would be gross otherwise. This is why I think the gym is so great, because it’s one of the only places I feel free from any kind of ‘look’. I can give zero fucks and just go for it. And, best of all, there’s air conditioning.
And by ‘go for it’, I mean go bat-shit crazy on the cross trainer. It’s the only machine I use. I wasn’t worried about people thinking I was fat at the gym, or feeling self-conscious – I’m pretty good at blocking that stuff out – I was worried I wasn’t going to know what I was doing on the machines and would look like an idiot. I tried the rowing machine but wasn’t coordinated enough; I just slid back and forth, and I’m pretty sure that’s not how it works. I tried the treadmill, but the fear of falling off was too great.
So Google became my personal trainer: if I felt like I was doing something wrong, I’d Google to find the right way. If I felt tension in my leg, I would YouTube an exercise to get rid of it. I’m really strong – like, bull-in-a-china-shop strong; I hug too tightly, shake hands too firmly, there’s a lot of muscle under here, but I don’t do weights. The one time I did, I started to look like The Hulk. I had no neck and I thought, ‘I’m definitely going back to the cross trainer.’
The gym is like a sewing machine: you have to learn how to do it right to get the best results. You can’t just shove a piece of fabric in there and expect to make a dress.
I’m not a fan of classes – I thought a HIIT class was punching, until I found out what it was and decided I didn’t want to do that. No way. I’m not trying to exercise on everyone else’s level. And Zumba is a hell no. I could do spinning, but I just don’t want to; I don’t want to be on anyone else’s page, I want to be on my own.
The gym is my time; it’s a sacred, meditative place where I can just be. I am such a people person, and Lord knows I can talk, but sometimes I need time in my own headspace. The gym is the only place I listen to music I’m currently working on, but for the most part I like listening to someone like Tori Amos. I like going double time to slow songs. Have you ever listened to Heartbeats by The Knife on the cross trainer? Do it now. That is my ultimate gym jam.
When it comes to other people in the gym, occasionally you will have that fat-girl moment where you clock another fat girl and you have this nod of acknowledgement, like, ‘We know why we’re both here and we can do this.’ If you’re fat, I think you have the fear – not fear of the gym, but the fear that other fat people think you’re selling out, that you’re trying to change yourself, that you’re trying to get rid of a label. Thank God the bodypositive movement came in and shifted the mindset; it affirmed that, actually, you can be fat and take care of your body, and that is all I am trying to do.
The thing about the gym is it can easily become about how you’re keeping up with someone else. If that side of fitness interests you, that’s really cool, but for me it’s just about alone time and taking care of my body; doing things on my watch; answering only to myself.
The only time I have ever been strict with myself in terms of diet and exercise was in the run-up to marrying my wife, Kristin. It wasn’t shedding weight for the wedding so much as maintaining my weight for the wedding, and that was hard. Jean-Paul Gaultier made my dress (that is the most chi-chi thing I have ever said) and, once he has taken your measurements, you can’t mess with that – it’s Gaultier! And it got me thinking: is this what people do all the time? Is this how people live their lives? Because I certainly will not. Eat whatever you want and exercise whenever you want to exercise. I haven’t been to the gym in months, because I got hair extensions, and that shit’s expensive. I can’t risk sweating it out! When you do exercise, do it to feel good about yourself and good in your own body, not to conform to someone else’s standard. Beth’s new solo album, Fake Sugar, is released on 16 June on Virgin EMI
‘I TRIED THE ROWING MACHINE BUT JUST SLID BACK AND FORTH, AND I’M PRETTY SURE THAT’S NOT HOW IT WORKS’