The new body hangup you 'need' to worry about. (Because there weren't enough before...)

I don’t believe in the ‘thut’.

What is the thut, I hear you ask? It’s not a mythological creature along the lines of the yeti or the Loch Ness monster – although from the reaction fitness experts are having to this simple word, you might expect that it’s equally monstrous.

The thut is, essentially, a word to describe when one’s butt and thigh appear to blend together and comprise a singular piece of anatomy.

From The Daily Mail:

The ‘thut’ as it was coined by NYmag.com, is when the muscles on the back of a woman’s legs are undeveloped – leading their butt and thigh to appear as a single piece of anatomy.

According to experts, the issue is caused by a lack of targeted muscle tone and does not reflect the physical anatomy for a flat derrière…

Valerie Samulski, the Pilates coordinator for YogaWorks in New York further emphasized the thut’s muscle tone quotient. ‘It just makes it look like your but has dropped down into your leg, you lose that lift – it looks like mush and in fact it is,’ she said.

Basically, it’s when someone has a slightly saggy, slightly undefined behind and a bit of wobbly thigh action going on.

Obviously I believe that this state of being is possible. Some people have flat, saggy butts – myself among them. No denying that.

But what I don’t believe, is that a word like thut is even necessary. I don’t believe that NYmag.com should have gone to all the trouble of ‘coining’ the phrase. I don’t believe that The Daily Mail should have published an entire expose on the dreaded thut, and given it validity by saying that, “It should be toned because it helps you stand properly.”

The thing is, the thut is allegedly due to the majority of modern society’s sedentary lifestyles. Many of us sit at computers for the good part of any day, sit on the train to and from work, and sit down for dinner when we get home.

The Daily Mail explains that, “The [thut’s] lack of development can be attributed to a shift in working culture, where many Americans sit in a desk chair all day rather than working in manual-labor-intensive occupations.”

Why is it that fitness motivation must come exclusively from finding things wrong with our bodies? Our convex stomachs, our more-than-bones arms, our jiggly bits. Our lack of thigh gaps. Whether or not we have a bikini bridge (regardless of whether this ‘trend’ was created to troll us all, it certainly caught on).

Why does mainstream media – and, by consuming this kind of media, we ourselves are to blame – encourage us to fixate upon the completely random aesthetic appeal of a thigh gap or a thut? Why not simply point out that sedentary lifestyles are doing no-one any good, and talk about fitness – not whether or not someone looks ‘fit’?

To start this trend, I’ve come up with 5 things you can do instead of worrying about whether or not you have a ‘thut’.

Here we go.

1. Get up 40 minutes earlier than usual in the morning, and go for an early morning walk. Even walking at a brisk pace for 30 minutes is better than nothing, and you can make it a lot more bearable by walking 15 minutes to your favourite local coffee shop, and then walking home.

2. Or – and you’ve all heard this one before – get off the bus two stops early and walk the rest of the way to work.

3. Pull your bike out of the garage this weekend, pump up the tires and dust off those unappealing spider webs, and ride to the local farmer’s markets. You will feel disgustingly superior to everyone else you meet for the rest of the day.

4. Take the kids to the park and try to engage them in a game of ‘tag’. Have you played tag recently? It’s killer.

5. Read a book. It’s not exactly an active pursuit, but you’ll be expanding your brain a lot more than you would worrying about thuts, etc.

Are you worried about your thut? Or are you more perturbed by the fact that a word like ‘thut’ even exists?