Although I believe that it is important for everyone to be fit and well, I also believe that a fit person is not necessarily a beautiful person. There are many reasons why a fit person may not be considered beautiful:
- The fit person has a physical trait that is undesirable by another culture.
On GirlsAskGuys, there is a strong bias against darker skin color. So, even if the person is fit and healthy, he/she is not considered attractive. If you add different cultural standards of beauty, as exemplified in the picture above, then the fit person may be even less likely to be perceived as "attractive" by people from America.
- The fit person is badly disfigured or physically scarred, and the scars prevent the person from returning to his/her previous beautiful face.
Physical scars damage the outward appearance of the person. And the person is left permanently in this state.
- The fit person can age, and with aging, people are usually considered less beautiful than what they were in their prime years.
Aging deteriorates beauty. It's no wonder why the beauty industry tries to sell products that would reverse or slow down the process of aging.
- The fit person may have a normal weight, normal blood pressure, normal blood sugar, normal cholesterol levels, but the fit person is still not considered attractive because of a physical deformity of the face or the body.
The physical deformity may be a cleft lip. The person may be perfectly healthy otherwise. Fortunately, the cleft lip is entirely treatable, but surgery is just not accessible or economically feasible to everybody worldwide.
- The fit person tends to wear extremely loose-fitting clothes, androgynous clothes, or a head-to-toe garment that conceals the body.
The burqa is a cultural dress that has stirred so much controversy in the West. While Western Muslim women may wear burqas, non-Muslim Westerners may feel threatened by the concealed face and body, let alone find a woman in a burqa attractive.
People who dissociate themselves of present gender norms may wear androgynous clothing, like this person below.
- Fatness is considered attractive by some cultures, because it is a sign of wealth and marriageability.
A fat woman in Mauritanian culture means that she is well fed, and if she is young, then she is marriageable. However, culture changes. Today, a young Mauritanian woman can be thin and still attract a suitor.
Conclusion
The belief that physical fitness is correlated with beauty is erroneous. That is never and has never been the case. Humans are mostly cultural beings, and culture shapes beauty standards. More generally in the animal kingdom, males may have some kind of weird physical feature that puts a burden on them by natural selection, but the maladaptive trait may be kept in the species because of sexual selection. Therefore, I contend that (physical) fitness does not mean beauty.
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