As a teen with an eating disorder, Richard Simmons showed me I could exercise with joy and hope

After panning over New York City, swooping from bridge to train, the camera drops to calf-level, looking out from a shoe store shop display. On the sidewalk, a man pauses, raising a leg to try on the pair in the window. The leg is bare, tan, and toned, not poured into jeans; the shoes aren’t black leather, they’re blizzard-white trainers. It’s not “Stayin’ Alive” throbbing but a Gibbsian falsetto droning, “Get on down.”

The “Saturday Night Fever” homage continues, the man strutting into a Brooklyn home. He flicks through a closet’s rainbow of tank tops, picks out a halo of tawny curls, and enters a nightclub (Brooklyn Disco) to a chorus of “how you doin’s.”

By that point, not yet two minutes into the video, I was marching. Keeping time with the beat in my socks, a scant six feet from the looming media cabinet in our cramped living room. It was the only room with a TV, and for “Disco Sweat” I’d endure my self-consciousness about exercising a hallway away from my mom, in the kitchen. I was 15. Three years out from an anorexia diagnosis, post-relapse number two, any physical exertion was suspect. And was I going to exert! I’d boogie to “Boogie Fever,” clap to “Born To Be Alive” and sashay to “I Will Survive,” inches from shimmying into the La-Z-Boy or Travolta-armsing our Airedale. Reflexively, I smiled at the TV. I was about to spend 70 minutes with Richard Simmons.

Simmons, who died on July 13 a day after his 76th birthday, was as recognizable as the golden arches of McDonalds. There was no discovering him. When I was growing up in the ’90s, he’d already become an icon. The fusilli hair, the oiled skin (subject of familiar jabs about the source of his signature glisten…Pam?), the spangle, the voice. The voice! Gleeful, giddy, earnest and encouraging, adamant yet never authoritarian. It was a voice apart from others, flouting the dire, eroticized militancy of gyms like those then-ubiquitous ads for Bally Total Fitness (“Firm arms, rock hard abs, for less than a $1 a day”).  

Simmons was a tonic to those who found those creatine temples intimidating or inaccessible. Who found that rhetoric overbearing or off-putting. Who didn’t want to build muscles while being belittled. Watch any of Simmons’ videos — and I watched all of them, borrowing them from the library again and again, pledging my allegiance to “Sweatin’ to the Oldies Vol. 2” (“Windy”!) over Vol. 1 (too slow) — and you’ll see a cast of real-life folks, people who’ve lost weight with Richard. At the end of “Disco Sweat,” those backup dancers run toward the screen, accomplishment quantified on screen: “David Jacobs, 107 pounds.”

As a teenager, anxious about three or five pounds, I jogged in place during those last minutes, sometimes tearing up, sometimes clapping. I never found these numbers triggering, never left “Disco Sweat” determined to outpace another’s loss. Instead, I left hopeful; someday, I might be as embracing, as joyous, as a light-hearted as Richard.

Perhaps because I was in the grips of my own eating disorder, I understood that that sunny affect must’ve been hard-won. It was. After spending approximately two hundred hours Disco Sweating, I read Simmons’ memoir, “Still Hungry—After All These Years.” Unlike the subjects of most eating disorder memoirs I devoured, Simmons had lived a varied, wanderlusty life. He was a musical theater nerd, an actor, a makeup rep and the most charismatic waiter in LA before becoming an entrepreneurial smash: actor, author, studio owner, teacher, infomercial sensation with products like Deal-a-Meal. But catch his cameo in “Satyricon”; you’ll see the haunted gauntness in his eyes and know that, for two decades, he was also killing himself with food.

What stuck with me was his recounting of the period he spent in Italy in his 20s. While working as a commercial actor, he receives an anonymous note (“RICHARD—YOU’RE VERY FUNNY BUT FAT PEOPLE DIE YOUNG. PLEASE DON’T DIE”) stuck to the windshield of his Fiat. He feeds lire into a public scale and, shocked by the number, embarks on a starvation diet so extreme he winds up passing out near the Uffizi Gallery. He wakes up in Santa Maria Nuova Hospital, having lost 112 pounds in less than three months. His organs were failing.

“I had been on both sides of the ruler,” Simmons writes. “I had been on the overweight, obese side, and then I had quickly seesawed to the very, very thin side—too thin. At this point in my life I was no better off, no more intelligent, and had no more knowledge than I did when I took that first diet pill in the sixth grade. Now it was time for me to try to find some balance, some middle ground, for the first time in my life.”

Balance. You couldn’t have said a nastier word to teenage anorexic me. Balance was for the undriven and the ordinary, people too weak to sacrifice everything in pursuit of their goal. Balance didn’t promise flat abs or jutting ribs. And yet, reading Richard, I wept. I couldn’t admit it yet, but I recognized it: my bleak, stupid mission.

I wish I could say that Richard Simmons fast-tracked my recovery from anorexia, but then that would be as cliché and saccharine as one of the skits in his workout videos, minus the camp. (And he was campy from the get-go, goofing and jestering: his first book titled, “Never-Say-Diet.”) Instead, Richard’s voice was a reprieve from my dour, cynical, toxic self-talk. Richard’s voice—so puckish and irreverent, singing “burn baby burn,” even talking about burning calories—was so unserious that it was infectious. Who would want to be uptight when you could be irrepressible? He was a cross between Puck and the Energizer Bunny, and yet he was an utter original. That’s the sort of thing David Letterman would say to him, when he made a late-night appearance, always using his name with that parental admix of bafflement and fatigue: “Richard.”

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His voice didn’t proselytize, either, and so I’m grateful that Richard was in the back of my mind, when the body positivity movement swept and seemed a new kind of dogma. I was grateful for Richard when I began doing another exercise video on repeat, one led by a frigid ballerina who never flubbed or joked. Yes, the Simmons oeuvre prizes weight loss but not at the cost of self-judgment.

In the last decade, Simmons retreated. He stopped leading classes at the Richard Simmons Slimmons Studio. He wanted to live a quiet life. There was speculation—was he being held prisoner, was he dying—but I prefer to imagine he had simply relaxed into existence, a state of satiation. Not worried about worrying about his fans (he was a compulsive fan-mail responder), not worried about numbers: likes, follows, revenue, pounds.

In the years I did “Disco Sweat,” I often forgot I was working out. Sometimes, babysitting my little sister, I roped her into doing the video, too. We laughed a lot: Richard’s cherubic smile, his costumes, his charms and puns. Unlike running or my herky-jerky stints on the Nordic Machine strider in the basement, there was no specter of calories. Who could know how many calories I burnt during those 72 minutes? Sweaty, happy, I’d rewind the tape.