About a week ago, 2-D Teleidoscope made a post titled The Sexy Otaku Manifesto, in which he wrote about “getting back into shape” and called out to other “geeks” and “otaku” to do the same. 21stcenturydigitalboy wrote a response on Fuzakenna, The Inauthenticity of Nerd Appearances – All of Us Are Slaves, And Most of Us Are Liars that elaborated on the idea further, going also into the mindset that leads otaku to be unfit. He also told a bit of his own story and that of his friends/relatives regarding fitness.

These posts piqued my interest because personal fitness is a (dare I use the term?) passion of mine. I understand their sentiment, more than you can imagine, as I’ll try to show in this post. But something about the posts bothered me. They rubbed me the wrong way. I believe that they got their message all wrong. If you want to engender change in behavior relative to fitness, if you really believe in some “Sexy Otaku Manifesto,” you don’t do it by telling others that they need to change or by calling them liars.

Let me back up. Each of those posters said something about their own personal fitness history or goals, so I think it’s appropriate that I share mine. I’ll start almost 2 years ago in July of 2008. I’m 5 feet, 9 inches (175cm) tall and have been for about a decade now. At that point, I weighed 217 pounds (98.4Kg). For those of you without a BMI calculator handy, that’s a 32.1 BMI, or well into the “obese” range. And even though BMI isn’t the best measure of fitness, believe me, “obese” was the right word to describe me. I was the very image of the fat otaku.

OK, so I wasn't THAT far gone. But believe me, it was pretty bad. I didn't even get Persona 3 until 2009.

I can’t tell you what or if anything even clicked in me at that point. But I decided that I had had enough. I set what I felt then was a reasonable goal: lose 50 pounds in 2 years. By the end, I would weigh 167 pounds (75.7Kg), right under the 25 BMI boundary between “normal” and “overweight,” and that wasn’t even 1/2 pound a week! Piece of cake, right?

I started to eat right. And I started running. At first, I could barely make it to 100m before I had to walk. But if I had to walk, I kept walking until I could run again. I got my running endurance from 30 seconds to a minute. Then to 2 minutes, then 5, then 10. I still remember the first time I ran for 30 minutes. I had just passed the 3 mile marker when my watch finally read “30:00.” I was so busy looking at the watch, I tripped on my own feet and landed face first. Fortunately, I had maintained enough control to fall to the side, onto the grass. The dirt was sweet, and it was September.

Then from 30 to 40. I leveled off at that, spiking upwards only when I really felt good. It was a cold, snowy winter that year, but it only made me more excited. By the time the calendar had rolled around to 2009, I had run more than 50 minutes exactly once, covering 6 miles in 54. And I weighed 169 pounds (76.7Kg). My BMI was pretty much right on that 25 line that I had shot for.

Then came the strength training. I won’t bore you any further with the numbers regarding that. Right now, 1 year 10 months after I had made my choice, I weigh 144 pounds (65.3Kg). That’s a BMI of 21.3, right around the middle of the “normal” range. I can squat 3/4 of my body weight, do 14 pull ups, run a 10K in 42:44 (6:53/mile). I’ve become fit.

What am I trying to say here? Am I trying to brag? Maybe. I do feel proud. But on the Internets, everyone is a tough guy. Everyone is a man’s man and everyone looks like someone from 300 (I wonder how many times that movie has been referenced in relation to fitness?). There is no reason for you to believe me, so I don’t think I’d be accomplishing anything by bragging. Maybe I just wanted to write it down to make me feel good.

On the Internets, everyone's a tough guy.

But the purpose with which I wrote this is to put a proper context to what I’m about to say. When it comes to fitness and weight loss, I’ve been to hell and back (That’s not to say that I’m done. I’ll continually be reaching for more for for the rest of my life). And I did it effortlessly. I never once looked at my plate with dread or despair over the contents. My heart only pumped harder with excitement when it was 20 degrees outside and I had a date with 4.5 miles of road. I got the gain with no pain (well, except for that knee injury I had in spring 2009). I believe that my message holds true even if you ignore my history with fitness, but I believe having it in mind strengthens it. Take it for what you will.

Maybe the ease with which I had achieved my goals fills me with guilt, which is why my sensibilities were offended by some of the content in 2DT’s and 21stcenturydigitalboy’s posts. They have the right idea, at the high level: put your mind to it, and your body can be what you want it to be. And if you don’t care how your body looks, think very deeply about why that is. Are you being honest to yourself? Are you being fair to yourself? I don’t pretend to know the answer for anyone; I can barely answer the question for myself. But if you can say yes, you’ve reached a state of mind that few of us can ever hope to reach.

But it’s wrong to think you can cause behavioral change by simply telling them to change or by calling them liars. At best you’re just insulting them. At worst, you’re only contributing to the cycle of low self esteem that can lead to bad fitness in the first place. Real change comes from within. And no one can control that but the person himself.

And that’s what I’m really trying to get at here. It’s not anyone’s place to tell others that they should look a certain way. We choose to be who we are. Some of don’t prioritize our fitness as highly as others. Some – most – no, probably all – of us lie to ourselves to make ourselves feel better. But that’s our choice. It was my choice to become healthy, to become fit, and that’s why it worked and has lasted. Change not of our own choosing is meaningless and cannot survive.

If you really want to see others change, give them the tools, the encouragement, the ideas of change. First, let them understand that it’s possible. Then, give them the choice. Maybe give them a nudge, but don’t push, because they’ll only push back. 2DT himself seems to understand this when he writes, “The people I’d really like to reach with this message will likely never read it, or simply ignore it.”

I had said that getting fit had been easy for me. It’s true. But what allowed that was the biggest change in me, which was in my mind. As my mindset changed, I learned to like – to love – the things that would naturally cause my body to become fit. It was gradual, and I only realized it after the fact.

But I’m not naive or arrogant enough to think that just because I found the change to be easy, it should or will be for others. It was only in looking back that I realized just how much my mind had changed. I had become a different person, and I had barely realized it in the process. It’s pretty daunting to think of at times. I refuse to trivialize it by telling others to simply go do it.

So what really can I contribute? What can I do if I want people to change? If I want others to make the same kinds of decisions regarding their bodies as I made regarding my body? There’s no knowledge I can offer that you can’t find in a million other places. (except maybe this: People on /fit/ are assholes, but they know what they’re talking about. If you can stand the heat, take a gander over there and read some threads, even start one. I take no responsibility for the consequences).

To paraphrase Hitagi from Bakemonogatari episode 12, “What I can offer is my body.” It is yet another example of people changing their fitness for the better. There’s no reason why your body can’t be one too. I’m going to invoke Kamina here, just like 21stcenturydigitalboy did with his post. Not for his perfect body, but rather for his message. Believe in yourself. If you can’t, believe in me, because I’ve been down the same path, and I believe that you can do it too.

What do Archer, Shizuo, and Kamina have in common besides being perfect physical specimen? They got to where they are by doing what they believed in. (OK, fine, Shizuo kinda had an unfair advantage. But you know what I mean).

If you get nothing else out of this post, if this is tl;dr, let me just try to get this one message out: don’t judge. Just think about what it means to be an otaku. Like, how they use the word over in Japan. It’s a term used not only for anime fans, but for hardcore fans of anything particularly niche. It means liking something that few others care about to an extent few others care to understand. And that’s why in order for a community to form among otaku, judgments need to be held at the door. Let others be who they are.