Gem Loudon, 26, also was approached by a woman in the gym last month. “She said that it was great to see someone like me so confident to come to the gym and that it was great I was exercising.

“However well-meaning the person congratulating you is, it’s the same as saying, ‘How are you so confident?’ to a fat person, as if we shouldn’t be confident anyway,” Loudon says.

While she says this kind of incident wouldn’t deter her from exercising now, comments from strangers have prevented her from going to the gym. As a teenager, Loudon was approached by someone who congratulated her for being “brave enough” to run on a treadmill. She didn’t go back to the gym for four years.

That embarrassment is something Tara Kent knows only too well. Kent recently went on a virtual training course, where she started to tell the group about her morning swim: “I was talking about the fact that I’d been to the pool that morning when one member of the group (who I’d only met 10 minutes earlier), jumped in and said, ‘That’s such good exercise for you – really easy on the joints – well done!’

“It made me feel so embarrassed and ashamed.”

It’s that feeling of being judged that stops people from engaging with fitness. Even now, Kent wears long cycling swim shorts as she “doesn’t want to be seen in a swimming costume”. “Having [my weight] pointed out just confirms that people are judging me, which certainly has stopped me from doing things that I love.”

Plus-size fitness: “Why I’d like strangers to stop congratulating me for exercising”