Great talk by author and fitness expert Leanne Spencer (she’s founder of Bodyshot Performance) about the importance of focusing on fitness rather than weight. She starts with some startling and depressing statistics: the average woman in Britain spends 17 years dieting, and that 25% of 13 year-old girls skip meals to keep from gaining weight.

But, she argues, it would be much better to concentrate and work on “what we can achieve with out bodies rather than what they look like,” to shift– both individually and as a society “from fatness to fitness.”

Recently I came to a similar conclusion. I decided that my objective in my workouts and exercise was not to try to look a certain way, but to improve my strength and flexibility– to concentrate, as Leanne puts it, “not on appearances, but on functional fitness.”

I recently recorded an interview with Leanne for her Remove the Guesswork podcast, and we talked a bit about how exercise turns out to contribute to creativity and longer creative lives. It’ll be fun to see it up.