The Toxic Side of the Body Positivity Movement
The Blurred Line Between Body Positivity and Glorifying Obesity
Change in Times
Times have changed, and as much as some would say it has done so for the better, others would argue that things have gotten worse in other aspects to the point of them being disguised as good fights. Now, I know this topic is somewhat polarizing and some might get triggered by it, but please hear me out on what I am almost certain is going to be an unpopular opinion.
The gen ZERS or Generation Z have really made these times very sensitive, where you have to be calculative in everything you say lest you offend someone and direct the fury of the whole internet towards you. Everything is so damn confusing and there are a lot of buzzwords that circulate in conversations like this one such that a word like “fat phobic”, please notice the quotes, might just ruin you socially or take you a long time to recover after all efforts to explain how you never meant any harm online have been rendered useless. Everybody is walking around eggshells among the centennials including them.
The Bitter Pill
Anyways, back to the topic at hand. So, the other day I was listening to Lord Sear, a radio DJ, and he was doing a segment on Thick Girl Thursday, #TGT, or something like that, where he had women calling into his show and he was insisting that he only wanted to speak to women who were 200 pounds and up.
Now, in the US, the average height for a woman is 5’3 roughly, give or take, and I’m 5’4. Also, there was a time in my life where I was damn near 200 pounds. In fact, there may have been a point where I crossed that threshold but my highest known weight is 196, and that was enough for me.
Anyone who has ever lost a considerable amount of weight has had that big moment where you say enough is enough, and you take the necessary changes. Mine was the summer after my sophomore year of college, and right then and there, on that scale, at 196 pounds, that was when I began my fitness “journey”.
Journey, to me, is a bit of a misnomer because it implies an end, you know, like a final destination. However, there is no end. I’m always going to have new goals, skills I want to have, tweaks I want to make to my physique. I say all this to say that I know very well what 200 pounds looks like on a woman of average height, that 5’3-ish range. It’s not thick, it’s not curvy, it is obese.
Obesity “Sugarcosted”
Before we go any further, it’s important to understand that obesity is a medical classification. I know that weight is an extremely sensitive topic to many of us, including me. I have come a long way but once in a while I still get comments about my body that if I’m not wrong are always intended to be complimentary, but they still put me in a very negative headspace.
Word choice matters because what one person may consider a compliment may not be received as a compliment by the other party. So oftentimes, people will say things about my body that they think are nice but they are not nice to me just because certain words bother me. See? Sensitive times, huh?
One word that is generally not used as a complimentary term because it is a health condition is obese. But it is a medical term, and I believe it used to be defined as any person who is 30 pounds overweight or more. Nowadays, they use Body Mass Index (BMI), and incorporating that into the definition would bring obese to being anyone with a BMI of 30 or higher.
On the other hand, a BMI of 40 or higher is considered morbid obesity. The BMI system is far from perfect because it really only takes into account your weight in relation to your height. So it doesn’t account for lean tissue variances from person to person, bone density, or even hydration levels at the time the person was weighed.
However, the number of people who would really still have a healthy amount of body fat at a BMI of 30 or higher are in the minority and by far. We’re talking elite athletes who are just super dense with lean tissue.
And anyway, most of these people who would fall into this sort of situation don’t look like they weigh as much as they do, meaning they don’t look like their BMI would fall under overweight or obese, and they aren’t overweight or obese due to healthy body fat levels.
After all, muscle is denser than fat. So while a pound of muscle and a pound of fat weigh the same, the pound of muscle will take up roughly two-thirds of the space that the pound of fat would. This is how people who are super lean often weigh a lot but look very small because they are so lean.
Misused Terms
So using terms like curvy and thick are avoidance in my opinion. More and more it seems that these terms are being conflated with obesity because let’s face it, no one wants to be called overweight nor obese.
If we want to use celebrities as prototypes because in conversations like these people generally like to, Beyonce is curvy, Sofia Vergara is curvy. Neither of them looks overweight nor obese in my completely non-professional estimation.
Curvy has somehow become synonymous with or code for being heavier, and to me, it’s not accurate. You can be slim and be curvy. Model Tiana Parker is a perfect example. She’s quite curvy but she’s also quite slim.
The self-described “curvy women” who were calling into this radio show, the Thick Girl Thursday segment, were 200 pounds and above, and they were all invoking the same rejoinder that I generally hear with people of this size, men and women, “But I’m healthy.” “Oh, I’m 310 pounds but I’m healthy.”
I’m not saying this to be cruel because I reiterate, I know how it feels to be overweight and to be obese, both physically and psychologically. In fact, based on BMI alone, I am considered overweight right now. It turns out that I just have more lean tissue than the average — something I only learned after getting my body fat tested and finding out that my subcutaneous fat is actually very much within the healthy range and visceral fat is actually very low.
So again, I’m not trying to be hurtful but there is simply no way that a person can maintain health long term and in many cases in the short term when carrying around excessive amounts of body fat. It is a medical concern, period!
Let’s Call it What it is
I don’t know when the body positivity movement started exactly, but what I see more than anything is it being used as a platform to not only normalize obesity but morbid obesity as well. I feel like it’s a movement that started off well but kind of took the wrong direction.
The human skeleton was not built to carry around an extra 50 pounds of body fat, let alone a hundred or more. Our joints are not equipped for that and the human heart is not built to pump the blood for that much tissue. Our organs are not meant to be suffocated by visceral fat like that.
So to claim that you are 300 pounds and somehow healthy is nonsense. Your bloodwork might turn up fine today — I realize that there are plenty of people who are fine for now when they are in these morbidly obese ranges but it’s only a matter of time before that much excess weight takes a negative toll on them them your body.
We don’t all need to be crazy shredded athletic types either. I’m not talking about pursuing one specific physique type by any stretch. I am not a doctor but I have heard of them and I don’t think you need to be a doctor to realize that there’s a fundamental disconnect between being obese and claiming that you are healthy.
This is why we are seeing a rise in cases of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, various cancers. Many of us are already fighting genetic predispositions to a lot of these ailments, so why would we want to exacerbate our risk by eating like sh*t and not getting any activity?
I’m aware that some of you will think that my stance is “fat phobic”, and frankly, I don’t necessarily disagree that I am “fat phobic” in the sense that yes, I have a phobia of having so much body fat that it is actually jeopardizing your lifespan.
I understand that the intention of this whole body positivity movement is to rail against beauty centers that are a shade of impossible for most of us. After all, the heroin chic aesthetic of the 90s was just as dangerous just in the opposite direction.
Irony Much?
But that’s exactly my point. In the usual binary fashion of our society, by rejecting the beauty standards of the pin-thin runway models, which we’ve seen for so many decades, we’re now swinging all the way back in the other direction which is just as unhealthy.
The solution to anorexia is not obesity. It’s trading one eating disorder for another. Supposedly, 60% of Americans are overweight or obese. That is a staggering statistic because what that means is average size is now plus size.
So for this body positivity movement to so openly normalize obesity and morbid obesity, there’s an irony there because to remain obese and especially morbidly obese, a person has to be engaging in behaviors that are anything but positive every single day. And by that, I mean behaviors that are far from positive in how they affect your body.
You may not want to hear this, but your size is determined by a million little decisions in every moment and every day that add up to one big decision. Of course, there are medical conditions that make it extremely difficult for some people to keep their body fat at healthy levels, but following the example I gave earlier with the high BMIs not always correlating to an unhealthy body fat percentage, those cases are the minority.
The Sad Reality
Most of the cases of obesity that we’re seeing are an outgrowth of negative behaviors which are often a byproduct of certain circumstances. The fact is our food supply is largely trash. Poor and disadvantaged neighborhoods which are usually black and brown neighborhoods are food deserts, which then normalizes eating off of the dollar menu day in and day out.
However, I do think that the cost of eating reasonably healthfully is often exaggerated especially when you break it down per meal rather than looking at the bulk cost of the groceries.
Of course, it seems cheaper to spend $4 at McDonald’s and get a meal right now rather than spend 40 or $50 at the grocery store even though you can get enough food in that case for a week or more with that 50 bucks, and the net cost of that meal will probably be cheaper than that fast food.
But access to healthful foods isn’t always easy for everyone, let alone having an education on nutrition and what they’re really putting into that food at that fast food joint. There are a lot of socioeconomic factors that have contributed to the obesity epidemic but that is a whole nother topic entirely.
Nonetheless, the ubiquity of obese and morbidly obese bodies on social media, not to mention just out on the streets in the world, does not make being obese any healthier. And to me, the body positivity movement should by definition promote behaviors, lifestyles, and habits that have a positive effect on your body.
It shouldn’t normalize or even celebrate obesity. We should be focusing on behaviors and facts and not feel when it comes to what is actually positive for our bodies. And we should be body positive about things that don’t come down to lifestyle choices, things that we can’t necessarily change or help, and by that, I mean, let’s focus on normalizing things and being positive about stretch marks, birthmarks, cellulite.
Choose Longevity
We should not be body-positive about being 50% body fat. I do think of course that you should love yourself at any size. Whatever size you are today, you should love yourself. But to me, that also means living in such a way that you make positive choices and for a lot of people, that might mean positive changes for yourself and for your longevity.
It is entirely possible to love yourself but to still want to better yourself. Believe it or not, these things are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they are almost indisputably mutually inclusive. When I look at photos of myself when I was heavier, I’m really grateful that the obese me loved myself enough to make changes and put in the necessary work to get to a point where I am now today at a healthy body fat percentage because I remember how much it felt like I would never be able to do it.
Finding out my body fat was good because I learned that I don’t need to lose a ton of body fat. But I could still certainly be healthier and fitter than I am. I’m not done and that’s what I like to call my healthy dissatisfaction, where even though I’m very happy and comfortable with my lifestyle, it being sustainable, me being happy with my fitness level, I also think it’s good to have new things to aspire to just keep you motivated and keep you going.
It’s Not Always Rainbows and Sunshine
Despite the fact that I love my body, I do have days where I’m just like, “Can I just throw this whole thing away.” I’m just being honest and I think everyone can relate because even though that is not how I feel the majority of the time, we all have those days. If you lack the motivation to work out and stop eating poorly then that’s its own issue.
I mean, I know all too well how it can legitimately feel impossible to feel like you can’t do it, you’re a failure, you’re doomed to be obese forever, to feel like you’ve already lost the battle because every time you try to start eating better and start working out you fall off the wagon again and again and again.
So maybe after a few years of that, you decide to just throw in the towel and say, “This is just the way my body is meant to be,” and you decide to call that body positivity.
Hashtagging body positivity when you obviously have an unhealthy amount of body fat and you’re making no changes or no attempts to change that is often bravado and to me, it derails the entire movement or at least what I think the movement should do or should be doing.
I don’t think the Victoria’s Secret Angels and body types like that are all that helpful either, don’t get me wrong. I mean these women won the genetic lottery. I’m just saying that I think we need to stop lying to ourselves and get real about what a realistic version of healthy looks like for each of us as individuals with completely different bodies.
Get a Sustainable and Realistic Inspiration
We probably all have someone who we look at who has the dream body that we wish we had. For me, it’s Sierra. I could probably eat the exact same foods in the exact same amounts and do just as much dancing and training as Sierra does but I am never ever going to have Sierra’s body, period! End of the sentence!
And as much as I admire her physique, aspiring to such a goal isn’t realistic, isn’t helpful, and isn’t even healthy mentally for me to try to emulate her physique. So instead, I focus on being my own version of popping, and I am! And to even acknowledge that is a mental shift that only came with time.
Instead, I focus on what my best is within the context of what I’m working with and what my body type actually is. And I do my best to do so in a holistic way where I feel good, where I like how I look, where I’m eating mostly micronutrient-rich foods to keep me nourished, to feel my workouts, and to just keep me feeling my best day-to-day while also indulging in things here and there that maybe don’t necessarily promote health to the fullest whenever the mood strikes me because a slice of cake here and there promotes mental health.
If anything, I like to look at people with similar body types to mine as motivation. Those who have undergone their own transformation from unhealthy to fit or who just live a lifestyle where they are fit and at healthy body fat and I use that as sustainable motivation and inspiration.
Inclusivity
I do think the inclusivity of different body types in media is critical as we move forward. The 5’10, 120-pound Victoria’s Secret Angel doesn’t take into account that there are other body types out there that are just as healthy and beautiful if not healthier and, depending on your tastes, more beautiful.
So seeing an inclusion of different body shapes and sizes at healthy body fats would be body positive to me. It’s not necessary or even healthy for us all to be aspiring to fit sample sizes but I do think we need to get a lot more honest with ourselves about what we’re using this body positivity hashtag for and whether we’re using it as a way to excuse lifestyle choices that are actually quite negative because what is healthy can absolutely take many different forms. It's unique to each of us. By no means can we or should we aspire to one body type to rule them all.
Conclusion
In my opinion, there is no version of healthy that exists where you legit have as much body fat as you have lean tissue or more. I really do hope that this body positivity movement can shift to focusing on maintaining healthy lifestyles and making choices and doing things that are actually positive for our bodies rather than continuing in these patterns of negative behaviors that get us to the points of being obese, morbidly obese and then calling it body positivity because we choose to remain there.
Remember, you can love yourself and still want to better yourself because sometimes you don’t realize just how sick you are until you get healthy.
