It’s impossible to walk into Lily-Rygh Glen’s Flexible Fitness studio without your eyes widening, mouth dropping open and inside voice saying some version of “wow.” The word “Badass” is prominently featured in wooden letters on the back wall which is painted a soothing shade of minty green, and there is witty, snarky design-y eye candy everywhere to keep your mind busy as Glen makes you do crunches, planks, and lunges. Clients can bring their own music to their work-out, but a Prince playlist is always handy in case they forget. The mirrors and front windows have curtains, so clients can have privacy from their own eyes and other’s as Glen “Kicks your ass, but cradles you heart,” as her gym motto reads.
Lily Rygh-Glen, owner of Flexible fitness in her gym in Portland. Rygh-Glen is a beneficiary of Mercy Corps NW small business programs.Personal trainer Lily-Rygh Glen in her studio, Flexible Fitness in Portland. Glen is a beneficiary of the Mercy Corps NW small business program.
Glen is a self-described burnt out academic, from her first career she as an English Literature professor. She was raised in a family that prioritized books over sports, which “were for people who weren’t smart enough to read.” In 2010, when her mother was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, it forced her to examine her family medical history which was peppered with cancer, heart disease, alcoholism, drug addiction, diabetes, and early deaths. She had an epiphany of sorts and emerged from the sorrow of losing her mother with determination to break the unhealthy cycle. She started working out with a personal trainer, and eventually became one herself. She’s the kind of trainer who goes to trampoline parks with her clients when they are too shy to go on their own.
Later this year Glen plans to add a certification as a nutrition counselor so she can help clients improve their relationships with food. She emphasizes food is morally neutral, there is no such thing as good or bad food, “Some food is more nutritionally dense, but that there is no moral value in food and there is no moral value in you based on what food you eat.” Her goal is to help people remove the stigma around eating, “Especially for people in fat bodies. It doesn’t matter what you eat, if you are in public and you are a fat person and you are eating, there is a risk there, so I’m hoping to eliminate some of that through the training”
Glen points out that the success of diets is a measly three percent. The diet industry is built on a failure rate of 97%. She asks, “Why would I want to take part in that? If I was a doctor, I would never dream of prescribing a pill that only worked three percent of the time. Especially if the side effects of that pill were worse than the disease the pill was designed to cure.” Research has shown that when someone loses weight on a diet, they are likely to gain it all back, and then some. The diet industry thrives because it doesn’t work “it's specifically designed to create repeat customers off of products that fail almost universally.” If the products worked, the diet industry would crumble.
The 600 ft gym in Southeast Portland has personal touches aimed at making clients feel safe in the space. Her clients come to the gym with trauma, “you can’t be fat in this culture and not have trauma. My job is to help people feel safe, not to tell them they need to change” There is a debate about calling something a “safe space” or a “brave space” and Glen wants her gym to function as both.
Lily-Rygh Glen training a client
Glen faces challenges, even criticism daily for her body positive work. She jokes, “If I had a dollar for every time I was told I was glorifying obesity, I could buy a 24 hour fitness.” When she meets people and tells them she is a personal trainer she often feels scrutinised, “There is a sense that in this industry, you are supposed to look like Gillian Michaels, and if you don’t you’re a fraud. When to my thinking, Gillian Michaels is the fraud. She’s the one who is not treating people’s bodies with respect.”
She points out “You’d be hard pressed to find a community that needs a place to work their bodies more than fat people. They want to feel strong in their bodies just like thin people do.” Some of the strongest people Glen has trained have been the heaviest people, if you weigh 450 pounds, your muscles are carrying 450 pounds every day. “You are going to have quads of steel just from moving around your own body. “
Destigmatising the word “fat” is part of combating fat phobia. “Its so weird, ‘fat’ is just a descriptor, but we have a concept that ‘fat’ is automatically pejorative, its assumed your insulting someone,” Glen references other instances where communities have reclaimed traditionally derogatory terms, like “dyke” or “bitch” and says ‘fat’ could share the same fate. “It's just a state of physical being there's nothing more to it than that. People have always been fat. People will always be fat. I just don't see the point in creating a hierarchy of bodies, especially when being fat is largely something that people cannot control.” She acknowledges each person has their own relationship with the word but it’s important to destigmatize it for all the fat-phobic people who would use it as a weapon.
As a business woman Glen says that it’s been a bumpy road. Her best advice would be to do as much homework as possible. “For me that meant taking classes through Mercy Corps NW and really making sure I had my ducks in a row”
Through the classes she learned obscure yet critical details about running a business such as getting a permit for a sandwich board, and budgeting for a fire inspector. “I was so busy meantally decorating my space, I never would have thought of any of those things had I not done those classes.”
“I learned the most important thing was being able to look in the mirror and see someone whose politics and social values aligned with her paycheck” she adds “I realized that I could never go back to working jobs that didn’t mean anything to mean to me and didn’t do anything to support what I think is important culturally.”
Glen points to a ridiculously large “Feminist” wall hanging that dominates the wall opposite the “Badass” lettering. She says she didn’t realize it was that massive when she bought it, but it seemed appropriate. She kept it, reasoning “If there’s any question about what I’m doing. That question is answered. I train cis men, I train trans men and trans women. But at the end of the day, I am here for other women, that’s the group I’m here to serve, it’s what my heart tells me, what my consciousness tells me, what my political leanings tell me, I’m here to serve other women, however I can do that — that’s success to me.”
Profile and photos for Mercy Corps NW in Portland, Oregon June, 2019.