What really ticked me off about the recent brouhaha over a celebrity death was how quickly people blamed the actress’ fitness endeavours for her death.
They didn’t wait for a post-mortem or analysis of cause of death.
Their caveman thinking went: lady thin - lady thin because she ‘gyms’ - lady died - lady died because must be working out too much.
I am going to say something controversial. As someone whose entertainment and media diet includes watching lots of celeb training videos, celebs do a lot of rubbish in the form of exercise and nutrition. They look great and jacked. Sure. There is no arguing with how they look on screen or camera. But the methods and process are often incredibly iffy and random. And I am not going into the use of performance enhancements and other wild substance use.
And to argue that they look thin because they go to the gym is just ignorant. They’re thin because eat very little. And even when they look good, you have no clue what their strength levels are, what their conditioning levels are, how dense their bones are or how much body fat and muscle they are carrying.
To draw a parallel, imagine you watch Byjus living in a Dubai penthouse. Riding around in a Ferrari or Maserati. And eating steak at that Turkish nutjobs steakhouse. The one who sprinkles the salt strangely. And you think a man who lives like this must be a great businessman.
Or you listen to a podcast about excellence in entrepreneurship or being a good human being and you think this person must be making durable and high quality shaving products.
To judge a celebs fitness or conditioning levels by their appearance is akin to judging a businessmans prowess by his lifestyle or PR.
Case in point, a famous South Indian actress (let’s call her J) who relocated to Bombay posts her training videos. It is pure mayhem and chaos. You may think wow, she is so athletic and looks good. One could make a case for look at her moving so much. But that is not what carefully planned and executed exercise selection, quality execution and training with intent looks like.
Am I being a puritan? Not really. All I am asking for is some method. Let it be a quality body building program, some carefully executed cardio or conditioning or a powerlifting program. Or even a CrossFit WOD (with all its bonkers volume and weird kipping) executed well.
But it won’t be that. The execution is terrible. There are random tyre flips, dumbbells flopping around with no sense of personal capacity, lots of battling ropes being flung about and lots of partial range of motion.
All of this is to say your celebs are not as strong or well conditioned as you think they are. Some of them are. A lot of them train intensely for projects and drop the training habit like a hot potato for months before embarking again for a certain look. This isn’t a lifestyle to aspire to for you. And you definitely don’t have enough information to blame their training habit or choices for their demise.
