The body positivity movement encourages loving your body, but should you be aiming for body neutrality instead?
“I thought doing this all body image work would help me to love my body.” She had been trying so hard, but she still looked in the mirror and saw all of her flaws.
“I’m actually not so concerned about whether you love your body or not.”
“What do you mean?”
I took a beat while I tried to find the words to explain it. “It would be amazing for you to love your body, no matter what its shape or size is. But that whole body positivity thing? I think it’s out of reach for you right now. In fact, I think it puts even more pressure on you. You can end up feeling worse about yourself because you can’t summon up all of this love and admiration for your body, you know what I mean?”
She was nodding, so I continued.
“You don’t have to love your body,” I stated, rather boldly. “But you do have to respect it. And respecting your body starts with eating enough. And not being rude to it, calling it fat and ugly. Your body shows up for you day after day, no matter how badly you’ve mistreated it. It deserves your respect.”
Body neutrality, or body respect as I often call it, is a concept that has become a standard part of my practice these days.
I think the social movement of body positivity – loving your body no matter what it looks like – is another case of a nice theory that just doesn’t really pan out in the real world.
Most of my clients desire to change their body, to alter their appearance. And I don’t want to invalidate that desire. It’s totally okay to want that. But I do want to stress that it’s not okay to abuse your body to reach appearance goals.
“I’d be happy with my body if I were just 5kg lighter,” is a lie that I’m told all the time. Why wait to be happy until you weigh a certain amount, when you could work on cultivating happiness right now, no matter what your body looks like?
If we can have separate goals that aren’t focused on appearance, that makes things a helluva lot easier. That’s why when a client tells me they want to lose weight, I ask them why. They may say it’s because they want to feel more confident or because they want to reduce medication – so I will suggest that their goal should be gaining more confidence, or reducing medication. If weight loss happens, I want them to see it as a side-effect of their gain in health and happiness.
Because when goals are solely appearance-focused, clients get their blinders on. If the number on the scale doesn’t shift, they give up. If they miss a workout, or have takeaways, they let it derail them. They often develop this all-or-nothing attitude. And they can slip into abusing their body quite easily. Because when their whole goal is to change their body, it’s easy to feel that their body is the enemy.
Plus, in the end, no matter how much their body changes, it never seems to be enough. They’ll still tell me the “I’d be happy with my body if I were just 5kg lighter” lie.
I believe that it’s better to learn to respect their body as it is right now, and focus on what it can do (and what it does do for them every single day), rather than what it looks like. And work towards a goal that is completely separate from their appearance.
Maybe one day they’ll love what their body looks like. I hope so. But we’re not waiting on “one day”, we need to get through today. So I’ll talk body neutrality over body positivity any day.
So much so that I’ve devoted an entire lesson to it in my new mini-course, Beating Binge Eating. Because everything you think you know about binge eating, everything you’ve been taught, is wrong.
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