Body Neutrality vs Body Positivity — What’s the Difference?
Body Neutrality vs Body Positivity
Both body positivity and body neutrality can be helpful on anyone’s journey to build a positive body image. In order to contrast body neutrality vs body positivity, let’s talk about each concept separately.
What is Body Positivity?
Body positivity is a social movement that focuses on abolishing beauty standards that have been set by society. The body positivity movement aims to challenge how society views the body, especially the female body. It strives to create equality for bodies of all sizes, colors, and genders.
It aims to encourage and promote the acceptance of all bodies. The goal is to dismantle beauty standards and shine a light on the unrealistic beauty expectations that have been created by society over the years. Additionally, it strives to help individuals heal their relationship with their bodies and develop a positive body image.
If you claim to be body positive, then you are working towards loving your body despite any “flaws.” It means you aim to feel confident in your own skin, choose to indefinitely work on loving yourself, and accept your body as is, including its size, shape, and weight. It means you choose to love your body.
Being body positive doesn’t only mean that you love and appreciate your body, it also means that you appreciate and respect others’ bodies. It means you respect their size, shape, and weight.
It means you appreciate the beauty of others. You encourage and support others to love themselves and feel confident in their own skin. You don’t hold others to the unrealistic beauty standards that society has created.
Being body positive means you fight for body equality, not just for yourself but for all bodies.
What is Body Neutrality?
While most people are familiar with or have at least heard of body positivity, not as many are familiar with body neutrality. One way to look at it is if body positivity is about learning to love your body, then body neutrality is about learning to simply accept your body.
If learning to love your body seems too hard or nearly impossible, then body neutrality might be a good option for you or it may be a good place to start. Some people choose to use body neutrality as a step to achieve a positive body image, while others choose body neutrality as their final goal.
Body neutrality is about feeling neutral towards your body. It’s about not placing worth on your body or viewing it as good or bad. Body neutrality focuses less on what the body looks like and more on what the body is capable of doing.
It doesn’t focus on how you feel about your body, it instead focuses more on the fact that your body is what keeps you alive and allows you to function every day. It’s about accepting your body, as is, and then choosing to move on with your day.
That means your day or mood isn’t influenced by your body image. Instead, body neutrality encourages spending less time thinking about our bodies and freeing up that mental space for other things in life.
Just like with body positivity, body neutrality isn’t only about being neutral towards your body. It also involves viewing others with this same neutrality. This means placing no value on the appearance of others, just as you do for yourself.
Can the Two Concepts Work Together?
It’s helpful to compare body neutrality vs body positivity. While they differ, I personally think the two can work together. I don’t think one is better than the other. However, I do think that people will feel pulled to one more than the other.
Additionally, I think people will experience both throughout their body image journey and that each one can serve a different purpose in that process.
With that said, which one are you more drawn to? Body positivity or body neutrality? And why do you think you’re drawn to that one?
I think it’s important to identify where you are when it comes to your personal body image journey. We can’t grow if we don’t know where we currently are.
Resources
Looking to read more about this topic? Check out my body positivity posts!
Interested in ways to spread the body positive message or to help you along your body image journey? Check out my anti-diet themed store full of fun body positive products!
Thanks for reading!
Rachel Beiler, MHS, RD, LDN
