What Does it Really Mean to be Body Positive?
We live in a culture that is constantly trying to sell us happiness and self-love through weight loss and beauty products. Despite this being everywhere, it can be difficult to understand the impact of these messages when they feel as familiar as the changing seasons. Recently, the concept of body positivity, which has been around for many years, has been shared more widely as a challenge to our obsession with appearance and quick fixes. Unfortunately, through the increase in its use, the term has been watered down and repackaged, and can end up leading to more of the same negative feelings that diet culture elicits. Because this problem isn’t going anywhere, it feels more and more important to clarify what body positivity is and what it isn’t.
With the current trends in diet culture, body positivity is being used to tell people that they should love their body 24/7, and if they don’t, they should change it. This idea automatically leads to feelings of failure; how realistic is it to expect that we will ALWAYS have loving feelings toward our body, especially when we have learned for most of our lives to be at war with it? It’s no wonder, with this messaging, that people end up believing they are at fault if they can’t successfully love or change their bodies.
So, where does that leave us? Body positivity is meant to be a tool to heal our relationship with food and our bodies. It is also meant to help us identify and challenge systems that marginalize and oppress bodies that are different from the “status quo”. It may not be possible to have positive feelings about our bodies at all times, but it is possible to treat our bodies with kindness and respect, no matter what we might be feeling. Body positivity teaches us that our body is on our side, keeping us alive and that we can learn to befriend it rather than view it as the enemy. Finally, body positivity tells us that we are MORE than our body, and what we look like or how our body functions have nothing to do with our worth.
If you are interested in learning more about Body Positivity, take a look at these books:
-The Body is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love by Sonya Renee Taylor
-Anti-Diet by Christy Harrison
-The Wisdom of Your Body by Hillary McBride