Body acceptance
Quit Saying the Body Positive Moment Is Ruining Anyone’s Health
If you knew why it started, you would support it 100%.
Hey, body-positive naysayers, I’ve got a little something to bark about. And I want you to listen.
The body-positive movement is NOT ruining your health.
If you feel that body positivity has encouraged you to let yourself go, you’re misreading our efforts.
The message we are sending out is this:
Appreciate the physical body you have and learn to love that body. Love and accept yourself for who you are.
We’re all different. We come in different shapes, colors and sizes. Beauty is not limited to one package. Don’t criticize yourself based on what you think you “should be.”
Here’s the real message:
The majority of influencers are not saying: “Hey, let yourself go. Be unhealthy. Get diabetes… and get some heart disease while you’re at it.”
They are saying learn to love the hand of cards you’ve been dealt and don’t hate your body. It does so much more than you give it credit for.
It’s imperfectly perfect. Respect it. Appreciate it. Take it easy on the criticism. You’ve only got one body, and it deserves your love regardless of where you are in your journey.
Here’s something I know for sure:
I work in the body-positive industry, and I do so for an important reason. If most of us tried to look like what we see in the media, we would be very sick.
While fat positivity has become a large part of the movement, and I do stand behind this, that’s not where the movement started. It started as a response to the media’s unhealthy representation of women and the billion-dollar (more than $70 billion to be exact) diet industry.
If you’re my age, you know that there was a time when life was a lot different. If you were a woman, you were expected to conform to certain societal standards.
If you couldn’t, you felt “less than.”
You were not supposed to have stretch marks from gaining weight or having a baby, breasts that were anything but perky and any symbol of anything that makes you human.
You were not supposed to show or tell your age or demonstrate anything that made you less than perfect. You were supposed to have superpowers that simply don’t exist!
Who wants to live like that?
These “normal” things affected your marketability, just like they do now. But nobody was fighting for you yet.
There was no Lizzo or Tess Holliday (who got body shamed, by the way) to grace the covers of magazines. So if you weren’t a part of what we called “the perfect crew,” you felt horrible about yourself when you read fashion articles.
And hey, this goes way past the plus-size world. If you weren’t five-foot seven (probably five-foot nine) with a dress size no bigger than a 6 (probably a 4), you were not going to make the cut.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t know many women who are five-foot-nine wearing a size 4.
As a result, women tried to conform to a standard that was completely unrealistic. It crushed self-esteem and led to body hate.
Yes, some of us are overweight. But that doesn’t mean we don’t exercise or we just sit around eating bonbons. It means that some of us are built differently.
And a lot of the people promoting body positivity are not overweight. I follow influencers who are thin and who struggle to love the fact that they don’t have curves. Men who struggle because they are not muscular. Influencers who have post-childbearing stretch marks and who are trying to celebrate the bodies they have.
The movement as a whole has many subparts, but it comes together under one umbrella.
And that umbrella is a pushback against the perfection that society once pressured everyone to achieve.
It’s also a pushback against the eating disorders that were so prevalent with Boomers, Gen X and many Millennials.
Think about this. (And here’s a perfect example of body positivity in action in the business world….)
If you fly today on an airline like Allegiant (my favorite), you will see flight attendants who represent all body types. They are there because they love what they do — and they are being supported.
This wasn’t the case back in the day. Flight attendants had to go through weight checks, be a certain height and were even regulated by what lipstick they wore.
And some former flight attendants say they were forced to wear high heels. I certainly wouldn’t want to be wearing high heels if I were trying to keep a plane safe in an emergency!
Basically, you had to be tall, svelte and gorgeous to make the cut. That was the world we lived in. And that’s the world we are fighting back against now.
If you feel that your health has been ruined because you’ve been practicing body positivity, you’ve got it all wrong. Your mental health should be better because you have learned to love yourself. And because of that, self-care has become your priority.
We’re here to tell you that you are OK just as you are.
P.S. if you’re still doubting me, think about this: Do you want to go back to a world where only “perfect people” fit in?
I didn’t think so.
