Fat-Stripped Workhorses: Two Ways Netizens Talk About Losing Weight

Lately, through a friend, I came across two memes that have taken off online. Both are about healthy eating and fat loss: "fat-stripped workhorses" (脱脂牛马) and the "raise yourself like a dog" diet. Today I want to talk about what I think of these two memes, and of the trend behind them. A fat-stripped workhorse is someone who slaves away like an ox or horse at their desk while also working hard to cut fat. Netizens see the helplessness of office workers who get squeezed dry by work all day, then have to squeeze the fat out of themselves at night. The "raise yourself like a dog" diet is a weight-loss method. Simply put, lots of human foods are off-limits to dogs, like chocolate, cake, sugary drinks and overly salty food. You also have to take the dog out for a walk every day. Apply that diet-plus-going-outside routine to yourself, and that's treating yourself like a dog. How do I see these memes? I think they're more than jokes. They quietly build up a negative mental suggestion, and in the end that leads lots of people to resist, psychologically, something that's actually good for them: healthy eating.

How Internet Memes Warp Healthy Habits

Form Acts Back on Content

Healthy eating and exercise are both just means. Their purpose is only to give people better health and a better quality of life. But when people describe healthy eating as eating dog food, that means starts to look a bit ugly and low. Why does a dog's diet have to be so healthy, though? Because when dogs eat food high in sugar and salt, their bodies react violently and they get sick. Humans are different. A high-oil, high-salt diet isn't recommended for healthy eating, but even so, it won't make a person's body react as violently as a dog's in the short term. It's only that keeping up a high-oil, high-salt diet for years plants seeds of trouble for your future health, including but not limited to high blood pressure, high blood lipids and high blood sugar. So by that logic, humans and dogs are completely different. If people also had violent physical reactions after eating high-oil, high-salt food, I think most of them could manage a diet that isn't high in oil and salt. But form acts back on content. If we put health inside the form of raising yourself like a dog, some people are bound to instinctively defend their dignity, and subconsciously reject healthy habits because they refuse to be a dog.

Stigmatizing a Concept, and a Culture of Repression

There's an obvious trend online of equating self-discipline with suffering. That's stigmatization at its root. Whether it's fat-stripped workhorses or raising yourself like a dog, both come from treating the body as a tool. In that framing, healthy eating has no flavor and no joy at all. It stresses only the most one-sided function of healthy eating, getting slimmer and better-looking. This is actually a form of repression of human nature. People aren't machines, and they aren't dogs. And once that repression builds up to a certain point, the healthy habits built in that context become very fragile and can collapse at any time. Once your willpower slips, or you realize "I don't want to be a workhorse, I don't want to be a dog," a binge in revenge is entirely possible.

What the Two Have in Common

Both fat-stripped workhorses and raising yourself like a dog can trap people in a strange opposition: health versus being human. In this framing, you either live healthy but like an animal, or live unhealthy but like a human. This bizarre and false opposition hits hard at building a healthy lifestyle.

How Do We Push Back?

Look Past the Surface to the Essence.

We shouldn't equate healthy habits with made-up concepts. If healthy habits are a tool, then what a tool can do depends entirely on the person using it. Only when you really use it will you know what it can do for you.

Healthy Habits Should Be Played for the Long Term

Lots of people say healthy eating and exercise make life unhappy. Is that really true? I think most of that unhappiness comes from wanting what you can't yet have. Some people run for two days and want to look thin. Some lift weights twice and want to be strong. That's impatience for quick results. Why does it happen? Partly because people crave progress and change, and partly because they lack the relevant knowledge and don't have a specific, systematic understanding of nutrition and the body. Healthy habits should be played for the long term. In fitness, for example, building muscle is a process measured in years. Many things are like that. We need to settle down, learn the relevant knowledge, and then do the work. Practice slowly, and wait slowly for the payoff.

Health Isn't Expensive

Many people subconsciously equate health with expense. But in fact health isn't buying power. It's knowledge. Whether it's expensive or not depends on what you know. Take ads telling you to eat kale and imported avocados. First, these things aren't essential or irreplaceable. Second, when you buy them, are you really only buying nutrition, and not the picture of a healthy body the ad has created? That's what Karl Marx called commodity fetishism. For more, see my post on it: Take carbohydrates. Pricey quinoa and cheap oats differ very little at the biochemical level. And compared with salmon, chicken breast and eggs that cost a few yuan provide an amino acid profile that meets the body's needs just as well. So in pursuing healthy habits, we should keep it simple and go back to basics. That isn't just a way to resist consumerism. It also makes clear what we're actually after.

What Can We Learn?

Nutrition.

Learn nutrition and take apart what you eat. Know in your own head what's in every bite you take, and eat for reasons you can explain, rather than blindly following trends.

How to Avoid Getting Hurt Exercising

Exercise is a double-edged sword, and avoiding injury should always be the first rule. Learn to protect your muscles and joints. After all, our bodies are for living better, not for wearing out.

Learning isn't just piling up knowledge. It also changes how you see things. Through learning, we can effectively guard against outside alienation.