The Body Narrative
We’re told Black women are the most “unhealthy” group in America. Overweight. At risk. Noncompliant. This narrative ignores a fundamental truth: Black women care deeply about wellness, and we’re leading the movement to redefine it. But when you strip away the bias, you start to see how incomplete that picture really is.
“Unhealthy” by whose standards? Because when we talk about strength,
endurance, and muscle composition, the numbers tell a different story.
According to the CDC, about 56.9% of Black women are labeled “obese,” compared to 44.8% of Latina women, 39.8% of white women, and 17.2% of Asian women. Those numbers get quoted often, but rarely questioned. They rely on Body Mass Index (BMI), a system created in the 1800s by a Belgian mathematician who never studied women or people of color. It doesn’t account for bone density, muscle mass, or body diversity across ethnicities. 
Research shows that Black women have significantly higher lean muscle mass and bone density than white women at the same BMI, often 15-20% more muscle mass…meaning weight alone tells an incomplete story. Studies on bone density confirm Black women have 1-7% higher bone mineral density as well. In other words, we often weigh more, not because we’re unhealthy, but because we’re strong. When that’s ignored, we’re misdiagnosed, miscategorized, and misunderstood.
The Culture of Movement
Health has never just been about gym memberships or green juices. For us, it’s the rhythm in our day. It’s dance, step, double dutch, Sunday cooking, walking the block, lifting babies, and holding families together.
The National Health Interview Survey even found that when you count all forms of movement (not just formal exercise) Black women report activity levels that rival or exceed other groups. But wellness culture rarely honors that. It glorifies yoga studios, marathons, and $20 spin classes, while ignoring the physical labor, mobility, and community-based movement that’s always been part of our lives.
When you start redefining what movement looks like, you realize Black women have never been sedentary, we’ve just been overlooked.
Leading the Movement We’re Told We’re Not Part Of
Here’s where the contradiction gets loud: Black women aren’t just part of the fitness world, we’re running it.
Michelle Obama launched Let’s Move!, one of the most impactful public health campaigns in American history, focused on children’s nutrition and fitness. A Black woman created a national wellness movement that shaped an entire generation’s approach to health… and we’re still told our community doesn’t prioritize wellness.
From Shaun T to Megan Thee Stallion’s “Hot Girl Walk,” (which doesn’t get enough credit imo) from Peloton’s Tunde Oyeneyin and Robin Arzón to the viral dance cardio taking over TikTok, Black women are the face, voice, and energy behind some of the biggest fitness movements in modern culture. We’re the instructors everyone wants to take class with. We’re the influencers setting trends. We’re the athletes redefining what strong looks like.
And yet, we’re still labeled the “unhealthiest.”
It’s f*cking hilarious how bad the gaslighting is.
So let’s be clear: the same community that supposedly “doesn’t exercise” is also the one teaching millions of people how to move. We’re not absent from fitness culture… we’re building it. The classes you take, the routines you follow, the motivation you feel? There’s a good chance a Black woman created that space for you.
But when the headlines and statistics roll out, that leadership disappears. Suddenly, we’re just data points in an obesity chart. The narrative erases our influence the moment it’s time to talk about health outcomes, as if the two realities can’t coexist.
They can. And they do. Because Black women have always been both, undeniably present in wellness spaces while simultaneously being told we don’t belong there.The Real Health Crisis: Stress, Not Size
The most dangerous thing in a Black woman’s body isn’t weight, it’s stress.
Decades of research confirm that chronic stress hormones like cortisol play a major role in inflammation, heart disease, and metabolic health. Black women consistently report the highest levels of chronic stress in the U.S., stemming from systemic racism, underdiagnosed pain, pay inequities, and the constant demand to stay composed.
The “Strong Black Woman” trope might sound empowering, but physiologically it’s costly. It’s not that Black women’s strength is the problem… it’s that we’re never allowed to not be strong. That constant expectation keeps the body in survival mode, making rest feel unsafe and recovery impossible. These disparities correlate most strongly with systemic factors… food deserts, economic inequality, healthcare provider bias, and chronic stress… not personal choices.
So when we talk about health disparities, we can’t ignore that the issue isn’t just diet or exercise… it’s the weight of the world we’ve been carrying.
Addressing chronic stress isn’t dismissing health… it’s one of the most critical health interventions we can make. Because true wellness can’t exist in a body that never feels safe enough to rest.
The Aesthetic Trap
Now let’s talk about beauty, because health and aesthetics are too often confused.
Black bodies have always been paradoxes in the public eye: praised, desired, and copied, yet simultaneously criticized, policed, and medicalized. We’re told to love our curves, but only if they come with a flat stomach. To celebrate our hips, but only if our waist disappears in the photo.
It’s not just Black women, either. Latina, Indigenous, and Pacific Islander women face the same contradiction… admired for having “ideal” traits while being told those same traits are signs of poor health.
The Western fitness ideal still centers around narrow hips, small butts, and visible abs — an aesthetic built on Eurocentric body types. But here’s the truth: abs don’t equal health. Visible abs are often a function of body fat percentage, not vitality, and for women with naturally denser muscle and bone composition, getting that look can require extreme restriction and stress.
That’s not health… that’s punishment disguised as discipline.
When the wellness industry tells Black women to “shrink to be seen as healthy,” it’s not promoting wellness. It’s maintaining control. The standard of “fit” was never built to include our shape. Yet ironically, the same features that have long been labeled “unhealthy”, thick thighs, round hips, soft bellies, are now being bought, sculpted, and filtered to perfection. Brazilian Butt Lifts, Instagram filters, body contouring: Black and brown women’s features have become profitable when extracted from Black and brown women’s bodies.
So the question becomes: who profits when Black women are convinced that their natural bodies are a problem to solve?
The Truth About “Wellness”
Wellness is a $5.6 trillion industry (as of 2023). Every time women are told to detox, flatten, tone, or fix, somebody gets paid.
But our bodies don’t need fixing. They need rest, nourishment, care, and recognition. When you zoom out, you see that Black women’s “health crisis” is less about weight and more about systemic inequity, stress, and a society that refuses to see our strength as health.
Because if you can carry communities, families, and history on your back and still move with grace, maybe that’s what true wellness looks like.
The Work Ahead
We don’t need to fix our bodies. We need to fix the systems that profit from telling us we’re broken.
Real health matters, which is exactly why demanding accurate metrics matters. We deserve standards that measure our actual wellness, not erase our strength. That means health metrics that account for muscle and bone density. It means forcing the medical industry to see us as whole people, not data points. It means rejecting any wellness standard that requires us to shrink or suffer to be seen as “healthy.”
True health includes strength and softness. Rest without guilt. Cultural movement and the right to exist in our bodies without justification.
So here’s the mission: Stop apologizing for taking up space. Stop chasing a standard that was never built to include you. And when someone tries to tell you that your body is the problem, remind them… a system designed to fail you isn’t evidence of your failure. It’s evidence the system needs to change.
We’ve been strong enough to carry the weight. Now it’s time to lift each other up.
