Yet I also know, from personal experience as a teenage bulimic and Jane Fonda’s Workout addict, that this quest, in its extreme and unhealthy forms, is itself a kind of doubling. For the person dedicating themselves to transformation through diet and fitness, there is you as you are now, and—ever present—there is you as you imagine you could be, with enough self-denial and self-discipline, enough hunger and enough reps. A better, different you, always just out of reach. Ehrenreich wrote evocatively of the strange silence of gyms, a place where people gather together in close quarters but barely speak to one another except to negotiate access to machines. This, she observed, is because the primary relationship at play is not between separate people working out, but between the person working out and themselves as they wish to be, their body double.

DEFINE: Introduces 'doubling' as a conceptual framework: the self-versus-idealized-self split, here applied to fitness and diet transformation.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 577