If you grew up in the throes of diet culture, when Kate Moss was the face of "heroin chic" and the inevitably thin DOLLY Model Search winners were announced alongside cover lines promising tweens "fun ways to burn fat fast!", you’ll likely have medium to high levels of residual self-loathing about your body.
For millennials’ formative years, thin was IN, and while size diversity is becoming more common in fashion and entertainment, back then most of the biggest celebrities in terms of popularity were the tiniest in terms of size.
Take Jennifer Aniston, who for years graced our screens as Rachel Green and took up bulk magazine real estate thanks to her high-profile marriage to Brad Pitt, her enviable hair, perfect skin and slim, athletic frame.
Watch: Jenifer Aniston dealt with Friends ending through therapy and divorce. Post continues below.
She’s a woman who probably has good genes, but equally has the appearance of someone committed to her fitness – any old episode of Friends will show you toned arms with biceps that didn’t land there by accident.
And while she's always been open about working out, Aniston was tactfully vague on the details of exactly what went into maintaining a body like hers.
I can remember reading about her arm workout in an issue of Cosmo and wondering why I didn’t look like her after dutifully doing it exactly three times.
But earlier this week, Aniston showed the brutal reality of what it takes to look 25 when you're 55 when she posted a video to Instagram.
Relatably, she found it a struggle to motivate herself to do her Monday morning workout after the weekend. But somewhat less relatably, she’d been at the Screen Actors Guild Awards until the wee hours and was probably more exhausted than the average Joe.
As she did mountain climbers, leg raises and pushups before collapsing onto the ground, flat on her face, Aniston said: "You know those days when you just don’t wanna do it? You just gotta do it."
Do we? Not really.
Most of us non-celebrities only have our own self-criticism of our bodies to battle with. Her body has been relentlessly monitored by tabloids (and, by association, the general public) for decades. We can miss a Monday morning workout and probably only feel a mild amount of self-imposed guilt. But Aniston’s post revealed that she still feels as if she can’t even do that.
In recent years, Aniston has become more open about precisely what it has taken to look as ageless as she does at 55, and it makes my three-arm workouts look pretty laughable.
Last year, Aniston became an ambassador for Pvolve, the workout program she’d discovered after a back injury in 2021. She revealed that the low-impact, strength-based philosophy completely changed the way she exercised, and we got a snapshot into what Aniston had actually been doing all these years.
"Our minds used to think, we have to hurt; no pain, no gain," she told People.
"It has to be an hour of a workout. You have to work out three times a day."
Aniston also told Women’s Health that she used to get up to do cardio every day at 4am.
"It used to be pounding, pounding, pounding. You had to get 45 minutes to an hour of cardio; otherwise, you weren’t getting a workout," she told British Vogue.
Except three times a day every day and 4am workouts are pretty unachievable for the average, non-celebrity – unless you’re a personal trainer, perhaps?
The interviews she did about her past made me feel better about myself.
I liked that she was finally being honest about the extraordinary lengths she went to, for sharing exactly what it took to defy her age – because it’s something most of us wouldn’t have the money or time to achieve (or the f**ks to give).
Aniston also shared the toll her old regime had taken on her physically.
"I just burnt out and broke my body," she told InStyle.
"My physical therapist gave me a Barbie doll that's covered in tape… to show every injury I've had in the last 15 years.
"We have to be kind to our bodies."
I enjoy Aniston’s new brand of transparency around exercise, but it’s still completely unrelatable.
Take your own advice and be kind to yourself, woman! Have the sleep-in and do the push-ups on Tuesday.
Image: Pvolve.
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