Most people who have been following us know that our patron saint is Pope Saint John Paul II. There are so many ways we try to embody his philosophy and theology in what we do here at Hypuro Fit, without compromising a technically excellent approach to exercise and nutritional disciplines. After all, he once said, "There is no such thing as 'catholic chemistry', there is just chemistry." Likewise, we say there's no such thing as a Catholic workout. There's just good workouts.

Our most influential thought from him, obviously, comes from his theology of the body and his call of self-mastery for self-gift in TOB 15.2. However, anybody who's studied theology knows that you cannot have good theology without sound philosophy backing it up. For Pope Saint John Paul II, his philosophy came from thinkers like Saint Thomas Aquinas, but also thinkers he disagreed with on a lot of things, such as Emmanuel Kant. One of the key principles he did adopt from Kantian thinking was this idea of the personalistic norm.

Namely, that one can never use a person as a means to an end.

With that in mind, we must remember that this personalistic norm also applies to how you treat yourself and your body. So many people approach exercise and health in a way that would tend towards practical Platonism. What I mean by that is that people treat their bodies as if it was something to be conquered, as something exterior to who they "actually are". They bifurcate their souls and their bodies and forget the fact that they are their bodies.

The encouragement here is to think like Pope John Paul II and to not use your body as merely a means to an end. You are your body. The goal of exercise and eating well is not merely to look and feel a certain way. For us, the goal is our sanctification.

This might sound a bit odd or a little extreme, but this personalistic norm is one that Pope Saint John Paul II applied even to how God interacts with us:

“Nobody can use a person as a means towards an end, no human being, nor yet God the creator. On the part of God, indeed, it is totally out of the question, since by giving man an intelligent and free nature, he has thereby ordained that each man alone will decide for himself the ends of his activity and not be a blind tool of someone else's ends. Therefore, if God intends to direct man towards certain goals, he allows him, to begin with, to know those goals so that he may make them his own and strive toward them independently.”

I would encourage and invite you to bring this idea to your next time of prayer with the Lord and ask yourself: When I exercise or eat well, am I doing it to manipulate and use my body in order to reach an end that does not glorify God? Do I identify myself with my body, or have I allowed false philosophies to influence my way of thinking and trick myself into seeing myself as apart from my body?

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