Dear Danni Levy, enough of the fat-shaming. Sarah Thomas is what a fit person looks like

Danni Levy, fitness trainer and star of short-lived series Life on Marbs, told the nation on Good Morning Britain that we should fat-shame people to end obesity.

Her words came in response to a line from James Corden’s segment last week, which struck a chord with plenty of viewers: “If making fun of fat people made them lose weight, there’d be no fat kids in schools.”

Corden is obviously quite right, and Levy’s words were unsurprisingly met with a great deal of criticism.

But this morning, as the news cycle churned over and people around the world began celebrating Sarah Thomas and her record-breaking, non-stop swim back and forth across the Channel four times, I began thinking about Levy and her ilk once more.

We live in a world where discussions around health, fitness, and obesity are often led by people exactly like Levy. Instagram “#fitspo” models and gym obsessives often dominate the narrative around body image, something which to me seems fundamentally wrong.

Levy is not going to the gym multiple times a day in order to swim the Channel four times – she’s going because she’s part of a culture, fuelled in part by social media, obsessed with aesthetics.

Fitness modelling is arguably just a new version of “heroin chic”, repackaged and repurposed to appear concerned with health – but just as centred around shrinking bodies as ever before.

Given that people like Levy are arguably as much victims of the societal pressure for perfection at the heart of fat-shaming, they really shouldn’t be leading the conversation around body image and weight loss.

Sarah Thomas, on the other hand, is exactly the kind of person we should be talking to about health and fitness. Arguably one of the fittest people on the planet, she has just completed a challenge no one has ever even attempted – let alone finished.

But Thomas doesn’t look like an Instagram model. In fact, she looks fairly ordinary, with a body that superficially looks more like mine than Levy’s.

While Instagram’s fitness community spend hours cultivating slightly more visible abs, Thomas has most likely gained weight to complete her incredible swim.

But instead we focus on the lithe, aesthetically-pleasing bodies of fitness models (men and women) while ignoring the very normal-looking bodies achieving extraordinary things every day.

If I had seen Thomas a decade ago, my relationship with my own body would be drastically different.

As a teenager I trained countless times a week, working towards my dream of being an elite athlete. My sport was sprint kayaking; to succeed in it, you need a winning combination of explosive power and strength.

At the same time, I was a teenage girl during the early years of social media – and I was increasingly conscious of my body and my perceived inadequacies, especially when compared to the gym girls I saw both on the internet and next to me while training.

Despite my coach’s endless pleas that I gain weight and eat well, I was constantly striving to take up less space in the world – unhappy in my (at the time) size 10 frame.

When I got sick at 16, my under-nourished and over-worked body couldn’t get better, and my elite sporting ambitions were over.

But what if I had seen someone like Sarah Thomas a decade ago, while I was starving myself in a misguided attempt to get the perfect, fittest body?

In a recent essay for New York Magazine, Madison Malone Kircher criticised the recent film Brittany Runs a Marathon for intrinsically linking the central character’s journey to become a runner with her journey to lose weight.

Kircher said: “By the time I ran the marathon – like Brittany, I took two years to formally train – I looked more like the ‘before’ Brittany than the ‘after’ Brittany. It didn’t make me any less of a runner.”

Nowadays I’d definitely be classed as “overweight” on the outdated BMI model, maybe even “obese”, but in fact, I’m in “perfect health” (my GP’s words).

While I haven’t swum the Channel four times, I’ve run marathons and ultramarathons, am training for an 11-mile swim up Lake Windemere next September and just secured a place in the 1500km London-Edinburgh-London cycle event.

I’m not saying everyone needs to be doing ultra-endurance races to feel worth in their body. But if we can undo this notion that only people who look like Danni Levy are fit and healthy, we’d all be far happier.

We need to accept that aesthetically-driven fitness and weight-loss has a dark side – and instead start holding up people like Sarah Thomas as our true fitness idols.