Getting fit is great – but it can turn you into a right-wing jerk | Zoe Williams

OK, this is going to sound a bit hypocritical, as I have wholeheartedly recommended every activity and pursuit, every wellness boost and rejuvenation exercise that the modern world has come up with. Try hot yoga: it puts you back in touch with your inner child. How about a morning rave? All the cardio of a regular rave, no ecstasy: what’s not to like? Botox? Fine, it’s plastic surgery, but it also makes you look much friendlier. Pilates, cycling, running, high-intensity interval training, Tough Mudders, barre, aerial silks, horseback riding: at one point or another I have insisted to anyone who will listen that it is merely their inability to, for example, incorporate a horse into their weekly schedule that stands between them and their best selves.

But there’s a dark side to wellness, which, in short, I always saw as political: Getting fit makes you more right-wing. The mechanism is incredibly simple: you start this journey of self-improvement and see results more or less immediately. You will feel stronger and more energetic, your mood will probably improve and soon you will think that you are in control of your own destiny. By the way, that is still not the case: fate doesn’t care about the number of steps you take. But until that fact catches up with you, which may never be the case, you’re sitting there high in your self-righteousness. You can tell this has happened to you when you start to inhale performatively, like the hero of an Ayn Rand novel.

It’s inevitable that you’ll blame other people’s problems on their inability to be as fit as you are. This is especially true if you don’t know them and they are just a bunch of numbers. All those statistics – depressed people, obese people, people with IBS – imagine how much better off they would be if they would just take responsibility for their health like you have.

And yet, just yelling at numbers will never satisfy that harsh, judgmental inner voice, so sooner or later you’ll turn it back on yourself. Fitness has a capitalist logic – I guess because there is so much money in it? – so nothing is ever enough. Once you can run 5K, you’ll want to run 10. Before you know it, you’ll be exchanging Strava stats with people you thought were throwaways, but now, miraculously, you find you have a lot in common. Always competitive, always striving for growth, even if by ‘growing’ you mean ‘shrinking’. Unfortunately, you have internalized the market. Besides, you’re getting on everyone’s nerves.

So now you’re almost your best self, except you can always do better, and this is when you start eating protein all the time. What then is protein powder? I don’t mean, “What is it made of?” – I know my way around whey. I don’t mean, “What does it taste like?”, because strangely enough I do like it, but that is only because it is the taste of pure virtue. What does it do to your soul that it knows what virtue tastes like and smooths it? And that’s before you go to lunch, carrying around a box of chicken thighs like it’s a handbag.

The only reason I can make all these offensive, very personal comments is because they are directed at myself. As unpleasant as it has been for you, riding through red lights, having high endorphins because you weren’t going that fast, it’s been worse for me. No matter how much you spent on leggings, convinced that you are now a yoga bunny, a completely fresh person, calm and self-realistic, I spent more and gave up faster. However long you may have spent banging on trying to make a philosophical case for a climbing wall, I certainly spent longer – that is, five minutes, which must have felt like five years.

Over time I realize that it is not really a matter of an unconscious slide into fascism accelerated by a treadmill. It’s more that every person has a certain degree of excellence, and the more you spend on your biceps, the less you have for your personality. Wellness can make you a bit of a jerk, that’s what I mean.