Healing From Poor Body Image: Critiques of Body Positivity

The body positivity (BP) movement has gained a lot of momentum and popularity in recent years. Personally, as someone with an online platform with topics surrounding food and body relationships, I do not identify as a body-positive activist. I have several reasons why.

One of my main reasons being that permanent and unwavering confidence in one’s appearance is downright unrealistic – no matter how well you meet societal beauty standards. Thus, the concept of BP can start to seep into toxic positivity territory. Toxic positivity, in its essence, is the suppression of difficult and negative emotions. Covering up the painful emotions of inadequacy and body contempt with a layer of unauthentic confidence and forced positivity is not the proper way to address the very issues that breed those painful emotions in the first place. I believe that acknowledgment of the roots of poor body image can be a more effective approach towards alleviating the issue. Additionally, the BP movement, which asserts that everyone deserves a positive body image, unfortunately, has been hijacked by thin influencers and diet companies as a means to be more “relatable.”

Furthermore, the body positive movement has gotten messy on who it is meant to empower.  You’ll often see debates about whether the BP movement is meant for everyone, or whether it’s a movement solely reserved for fat individuals. Historically, the BP movement stemmed from the Fat Liberation and fat rights movement, which insinuates that, yes, the BP movement is reserved for fat individuals. However, this in-itself gets tricky: what defines a fat individual? Yes, there is BMI, which places individuals into “overweight” and “obese” ranges on a medical basis, but this label is inaccurate and misleading. Two individuals that fall into the “overweight” range could have completely different physiques and many people that fall into this category can very well live their lives with thin privilege. There are also biases that exist in where people carry fat; those carrying it in their rear and breasts may very well be idolized, while those who carry fat in their arms and face are discriminated against. Thus, this raises the following questions: who is fat in the eyes of society? In what “ways” can someone be fat but be immune to fat discrimination? Do those that lack fat in certain areas also face body discrimination? And so on and so forth.

For these reasons, I resonate with the body acceptance movement more than the BP movement. I am NOT saying by any means that the BP movement is a bad thing; in fact, I think it is a very personal choice about which type of ideology you align with most and which best contributes to your healing from poor body image. For me, I believe that the “all bodies are beautiful” narrative that seems to surround the BP movement is simply missing the mark when it comes to why so many people feel a suffocating amount of inadequacy when it comes to their bodies. The why being: a crippling emphasis on the importance of being beautiful and attractive. The diet, fitness, fashion, and beauty industry have placed this level of importance on being beautiful, and that is exactly how they profit from you: by instilling a sense of inadequacy. It is this significance that has been placed on our appearance that fuels these industries, which subsequently accounts for poor self-image.

Thus, the BP movement aims to expand the definition of physical beauty when it is really the importance of physical beauty that needs to be challenged. I believe that everyone deserves to feel beautiful, but when our perception of beauty is dictated by our appearance, it will always be at the hands of forces greater than us. Especially when our appearance is constantly changing throughout our lives and when physical beauty will always be in the eye of the beholder. Whereas, if our perception of beauty shifts to be defined by who we are on the inside, the hold that societal beauty standards have on us is weakened. Thus, when our self-image is no longer reliant on our physical beauty, body acceptance becomes far easier, because our worth is no longer contingent on it. 

Fatphobia is rooted in the fear that our worth is threatened by how much weight we carry. Poor body image is rooted in the fear that our worth is threatened by the difference between the ‘ideal’ body and our own. Thus, the first step towards alleviating these issues is by taking the power out of the weight we carry and out of unmet beauty standards through radical self-acceptance. Self-acceptance can be exercised and strengthened, helping us gain resilience against the forces that threaten our self-image based on how we look. It won’t be until we define our value and worth on who we are rather than what we look like that we’ll begin to see equality for all body types – that we’ll begin to see our assumptions of others fade. All in all, I would not call myself a body-positive activist, but rather, a hardcore believer in the intrinsic right for everyone to experience unwavering self-acceptance.

• body positivity
• lifestyle
• self acceptance
• self-love
• wellness