Are You Buying a Gym Membership for the Wrong Reasons?

The alarm goes off at 5 a.m. Your gym bag is beside the front door, ready for action. Athletic shoes, check. Workout clothes, check. Combination lock, towel, water bottle: check, check, check.

This is only a test. You’re practicing for when you buy that gym membership because, gosh darn it, you’re going to use it this time!

For now, you can go back to bed and catch up on some much-needed sleep. You’ll be ready once that shiny new membership card is burning a hole in your gym bag.

Or will you?

If you do join a gym this year, you’ll become one of an estimated 58 million individuals who hold memberships at a gym or health club. But here’s a sobering statistic: a full two-thirds of them—almost 40 million people—will never use these memberships.

So why did they join in the first place? This is a good question to ask yourself if you’re thinking of signing up, as many so-called “resolutionaries” do at the start of every year. Your answer could mean the difference between you and the 67% who waste billions of dollars on a good intention that didn’t, um, work out (pardon the pun).

Every year, losing weight beats quitting smoking, volunteering, and spending more time with family as the most popular New Year’s resolution. It’s also the one most commonly broken, according to Time.

That’s your first clue.

It’s important to understand your reasons for seeking a gym membership before you sign a contract, because negative motivations often lead to negative outcomes.

What’s a negative motivation? Here’s one: trying to prop up low self-esteem by changing your physical appearance.

Wanting to look different on the outside in order to feel better on the inside may be a common reason to join a gym, but judging by the numbers, it’s not a good bet. If you have low self-esteem and/or a poor self-image, and that’s your motivation to start working out, you could end up worse off than you started.

“If someone goes to the gym to fix their self-esteem, they’re more likely to destroy it further,” says Anne Cuthbert, LPC, a therapist in Vancouver, Washington and Portland, Oregon who specializes in food and body image issues.

Houston, Texas-based eating disorders specialist Kelley Dawson, LPC, agrees.

“Typically, your feelings about yourself get projected onto how you feel about your body,” Dawson says. “This is why changing your body most likely won’t lead to improved self-esteem in the long run, since your self-esteem is what influences how you see your body in the first place.”

Dawson cites the following unhelpful motivations that send people to the gym. Do any of these feel true for you?

• Hating your body and wanting to change it
• Punishing your body for being the size it is
• Punishing yourself for having eaten more than you think you should
• Fear of weight gain or feeling guilty about weight gain

Shame and self-loathing are poor motivators. They may get you to set an alarm for 5 a.m., but they’re not good at providing energy for follow-through. Just look at anything you’ve ever started because you’d have felt like a bad person if you hadn’t. How long did you sustain it?

Cuthbert agrees that shame, along with feeling “unlovable” and “unworthy,” is a terrible reason to seek a gym membership. In many gyms and health clubs, she says, weight loss is held up as a desirable, attainable prize. Posters showing trim, athletic bodies are hung to inspire members as they work out.

Shame and self-loathing are poor motivators. They may get you to set an alarm for 5 a.m., but they’re not good at providing energy for follow-through. Just look at anything you’ve ever started because you’d have felt like a bad person if you hadn’t. How long did you sustain it?

But for those with body image issues fueled by low self-esteem, those pictures are more shaming than inspiring. “The message that comes across is, if you can’t be thin, it’s your fault,” Cuthbert says.

But it’s not that simple, she continues. Willpower doesn’t work in the long run, and dieting is “the best way to gain weight over time.”

Fueled by all those “inspiring” posters, you could find yourself entering a diet-and-exercise shame spiral.

What if you’re dead-set on joining a health club, even if you suspect low self-esteem is behind that goal?

Cuthbert suggests a good alternative if you can find it: a body-positive gym where the emphasis is not on weight loss or even weight control, but rather on the enjoyment of moving your body, whatever its shape or size. These havens support self-acceptance by modeling acceptance of all bodies.

If you can’t find one of those, you might be okay at a regular gym as long as your reasons for joining are positive. Some good reasons to buy a gym membership include:

• You want to be strong enough to take the stairs, carry groceries, or do other daily tasks more easily.
• You want to improve or maintain your overall health regardless of the shape of your body.
• You like to exercise with others and want to attend classes.
• You’ve had a membership before and enjoyed using it.
• A gym membership genuinely feels like a gift, and going to the gym does not feel like punishment.

Dawson suggests asking yourself the following question before signing up: “If getting a gym membership wouldn’t change the way my body looks at all, would I still want to get one?”

If the answer is yes, then go for it. The alarm is already set, your gear is ready to go, and it sounds like you are, too. Have fun at Zumba class, in the pool, or swinging those kettlebells.

If your answer is more along the lines of, “Of course not—that would defeat the purpose of going to the gym!” consider investing in therapy instead. Why pay for an experience that could further injure your self-esteem and solidify existing issues?

No matter how often our image-obsessed society tries to convince us our bodies have to look perfect, with support we can learn to love ourselves exactly as we are.

References:

1. Gym membership statistics. (2016, October 30). Retrieved from http://www.statisticbrain.com/gym-membership-statistics
2. New Year’s Eve resolutions 2016: Top 10 most popular commitments for self-improvement. (2014, December 31). Latin Times. Retrieved from http://www.latintimes.com/new-years-eve-resolutions-2016-top-10-most-popular-commitments-self-improvement-285738
3. Webley, K. (2012, January 1). Top 10 commonly broken New Year’s resolutions. Time. Retrieved from http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2040218_2040220,00.html

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