Fit for Consumption

<p>This is the first text to offer a comprehensive socio-cultural and historical analysis of the current fitness culture.</p><p>Fitness today is not simply about health clubs and exercise classes or measures of body mass index and cardiovascular endurance. <em>Fit for Consumption</em> conceptualizes fitness as a field within which individuals and institutions may negotiate - if not altogether reconcile - the competing and often conflicting social demands made on the individual body that characterize our current era. </p><p>Intended for researchers and senior undergraduate and postgraduate students of sport leisure cultural studies and the body this book utilizes the US fitness field as a case study through which to explore the place of the body in contemporary consumer culture. Combining observations in health clubs interviews with fitness producers and consumers and a discourse analysis of a wide variety of fitness texts this book provides an empirically grounded examination of one of the pressing theoretical questions of our time: how individuals learn to fit into consumer culture and the service economy and how our bodies and selves become ‘fit for consumption.' </p>