Table of Contents:
  • Author’s Note
  • Introduction: What Is the Fit Nation? Part One: When Sweating Was Strange
  • 1. Performing Civilization
  • 2. No More Fat Cats or Ladies of Leisure
  • 3. Sanitizing--and Selling--Fitness
  • 4. The California Beach Body Is Born
  • Part Two: Slimming the Soft American
  • 5. White Plains, the White House, and the Paradox of Prosperity
  • 6. Fitness Makes Us Strong, Not Soft
  • Part Three: From Margins to Mainstream
  • 7. The Future Belongs to the Fit
  • 8. Training for Life, Body, and Mind
  • 9. The "Tanny Touch";10. Slimming on the Small Screen
  • Part Four: Movement Culture, Redefined
  • 11. Yoga and the Counterculture
  • 12. Kenneth Cooper and Aerobics Universalism
  • 13. Run for Your Lives!;14. Title IX and Its Limits
  • 15. Swap the Fat for Your True Self
  • Part Five: Feel the Burn
  • 16. Daytime Disco
  • 17. The New Gospel of Fitness
  • 18. Turning Up the Intensity
  • 19. Not Quite Sports
  • Part Six: Hard Bodies and Soulful Selves
  • 20. Beyond Aerobics with Chanting
  • 21. Strong Is the New Skinny?;22. It’s Not Fitness, It’s Life
  • Part Seven: It’s Not Working Out
  • 23. Exercising in an Age of Uncertainty
  • 24. Eat, Pray, Buy
  • 25. The Limits of "Let’s Move
  • 26. The Pandemic and the Peloton
  • 27. Broken Equipment
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Index.