Despite its inherent motives to create positive change, the body positivity movement faces lots of backlash. There is one especially concerning form of backlash to me though, and that is the idea that encouraging “body positivity no matter what” undermines people’s desires to strive for a healthy body. I think this is particularly concerning to me because, until recently, I couldn’t really refute it.
In our society, this backlash many times manifests in the form of questions:
“If one third of American adults are obese, shouldn’t we focus our efforts on weight loss rather than ‘accepting yourself?’”
“Does this mean that any behavior, unhealthy or not, should be accepted?”
“Why should I encourage someone who is harming themselves with unhealthy habits to love the way they look?”
Until recently I didn’t have good answers to these questions. On the one hand I believed everyone was entitled to high self-esteem, and on the other hand, it felt uncomfortable to preach “loving yourself the way you are” to those who are putting themselves at a great health risk.
This was until I realized there are several logical fallacies from which these questions stem:
1. Good health, or looking a certain way, can be the only cause of good self-esteem
By this logic, the healthier one is, the more self-esteem one should have, right? For many people, this is unfortunately very true, and is the root cause of so much disordered eating behavior. Saying that you are only allowed to be happy with yourself and psychologically sound once you look a certain way is pretty much awful, no matter how you construe it. By teaching people to hate parts of themselves and that the only way to remedy that hatred is to lose weight immediately, you skip over the part where you are caring about your health at all.
How is being taught to hate yourself for looking a certain way ever going to inspire you to treat your body right and become healthier?
Shouldn’t we strive for a healthy body because we care about our own well being?
Ideally, self-esteem should come from within. Before you can love yourself you must first accept your flaws. It is only once this has been done that you are able to change what can be changed and live peacefully with what you can’t. By asserting that you must first change yourself in order to love yourself, you undermine the very belief that health is what’s important in the first place.
2. Negative treatment towards people struggling with weight will help them change
This comes from a mindset that people who are struggling with their weight must be punished until they somehow suddenly wake up and change their behavior. First off, if it were that easy, wouldn’t this punishment strategy have worked by now? Second of all, the fact is that weight, for many people, is an immense battle, and by pushing individuals struggling down further, it only perpetuates it.
3. People who are struggling with weight are ignorant to their situation
Again, this goes back to the idea that all individuals struggling with weight are unaware of their struggles and need punishment as a wake-up call. There certainly can be an element of denial that comes with being overweight. But upon isolating people for whom this is true and telling them they must have negative self-esteem until they change their ways, the most natural response is to slip deeper into that denial. It does not feel good to be told your habitual actions are harming your health. Therefore, in order to truly help people struggling with weight, we must not treat becoming healthy as concept about which we are enlightening them, but rather must provide support to succeed in this incredibly difficult task. This also neglects the fact that many individuals are completely aware of their unhealthy habits. Many of these people are working to achieve better physical and mental health, but again, neither thing comes with an easy fix. This only further supports the idea that we must provide all of the warmth and support that we can because weight loss is much more arduous and grueling than it may appear from the outside.
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The effects of living in a society in which having both a healthy body and a healthy mind are toxic and they infect beyond just the individuals who have serious health problems due to their weight. The National Eating Disorder Association reports that, “20 million American women and 10 million American men suffer from a clinically significant eating disorder at some point in their life.” In addition, 40-60% of girls ages six to twelve report feeling, “concerned about their weight or becoming too fat.”
If this doesn’t signal a problem with the view that positive self-esteem can only follow looking a certain way, I don’t know what does.
It can be hard when there are people in your life who do need to change their lifestyle in order to become healthy and are not. Sometimes that instinct to shame people for having what we feel is an unhealthy body comes from a place of anger and frustration that they, someone you care about deeply, are not taking proper care of themselves. But we must resist the instinct to push these people down and away in order for them to achieve some sort of ultimate awakening. We must understand that body health and body appearance are not the same thing. And we must understand that when the body positivity movement says that a path to a healthier self must include an outpouring of love from the person on that path and those around them, there cannot be any backlash.