IT is Janaury and dark and the majority are swaddled in a little extra layer of fat, given festivities just past.
Fitness classes are filled with the newly-resolved, ditto diet clubs and the vegetable aisles of supermarkets.
It's the ideal time to launch a campaign to encourage exercise, said the cynic in me when I heard of Sport England's new campaign, This Girl Can. "But can women?" was my first, churlish, thought.
Until I saw the campaign advert. It opens with a woman in a bikini striding purposefully towards a swimming pool and pausing only long enough to run a finger under each side of the bottoms and snap the swimsuit elastic off her bum.
That smack serves as the downbeat to Missy Elliot's Get Ur Freak On, the soundtrack to 90 seconds of women of all ages and shapes, colours and sizes, dancing, boxing, running, swimming, sweating, cycling and kicking footballs. Blue eyeliner smudges under exhausted eyes, sweat-spiked fringes whip back and forth, and bellies, boobs and thighs wibble unrestrained. "Sweating like a pig, feeling like a fox" and "I'm slow, but I'm lapping everyone on the couch," run the straplines. The women are hot and not bothered. It is quite spectacular.
Watching the advert it occurs that I don't think I've ever seen cellulite on television before. I definitely have not seen it in such an unabashed, unashamed, rippling way. Unless you take part in sport you probably don't know what other women's bodies look like, beyond the sanitised selection, an almost alien species, packaged and presented in women's magazines. Another positive for taking part.
Sport England found that two million fewer women than men are regularly taking part in sport or exercise, despite 75% of those aged 14 to 40 saying they would like to do more.
We are not doing particularly well when it comes to encouraging women into sport: the UK ranks third in Europe for numbers of men playing sport yet only 19th for women.
Sport England has set about to try to change this. Focus groups, research and talking to women revealed that they were stopped from taking part for fear of judgement: judgement about their ability, their looks, their figures, their fitness levels.
The women in the advert, who have been chosen to be sport ambassadors, speak of how difficult it was for them to begin exercising, given their size, their confidence levels and how they feel other people will feel about them.
These are all things most women can sympathise with. It's easy to become locked in a cycle of inactivity where the fact you are inactive becomes justification itself for the inactivity. Last year I just didn't have time to go to my regular class and the weight crept on. Soon the weight, and the fact I was out of shape, became my excuse for not going back. I had to somehow get fit before going to back to the class that had been keeping me fit.
The logic is nonsense, but the thought of appearing in a leotard in a room full of lithe, limber women is an act of bravery too far.
And I hate that it is so but women can be their own worst enemies. The fear of judgement is quite real but is judgement the reality? The cliche is that all-women exercise classes are cliquey. It's hard to go unless you have a chum to go with. I have been to classes where no one speaks to you, the in-class groups are established and it's tought being the new girl.
Maybe part of This Girl Can could be an onus on women to encourage other women to get and stay involved. After all, sport is as much about teamwork and solidarity as it is physical fitness. It reduces stress, gives us a break from constant responsibilities and cements friendships.
The Chief Medical Officer has described inactivity as Scotland's fourth biggest killer, a direct cause of 2,500 deaths a year at a cost of £660 million to the public purse - the positive response to This Girl Can is something Sport Scotland should keep a close watch on.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article