Body Positive Movement: More Cons Than Pros
Since about 2010, the new wave of the body positive movement started to ignore science, steer away from helping people get healthier, and start to stigmatizes discussion rooted in science as fat shaming.
According to Wikipedia, the body positive movement has had a few waves, starting back in the 60’s, resurging in the 90’s, and back full force in 2010. In the 60’s it was about ending discrimination of people based on their size, and had questionable goals to distinguish health from body weight — more on that later. In the 1990’s the movement was focused on a more rational goal of allowing people who are overweight or obese a space to workout that is comfortable and approachable within the fitness community. As a fat person myself, I can understand that goal more than others, but still not fully convinced a whole movement was needed to help people feel better — maybe a harder, yet more worthy, approach would have been to start to work on internal processes and developing strength and resiliency in the individual to work through discomfort and get into the fitness space that is already there. Nevertheless, the movement that started back in 2010 can be summarized with the popularized hashtag #effyourbeautystandards where the goal is to empower people of all shapes and sizes to love their bodies. It advocated for representation of larger bodies in the media and TV shows, ads, models, etc. It has tried to dispel the notion that thinner is prettier.
This isn’t a bad thing on its surface. But self love isn’t all about accepting your body as it is, if it gets in the way of your health. Self love isn’t really all about how you look. True self love, just like showing true love to someone else, requires you to face the issues that you have and actively work on them, no matter how hard the road may be. True love, like in the love given to someone else, doesn’t mask issues or mistakes with band-aid statements like “things will work out for the best” or “everything will turn out ok.” True love shows you what you need to work on in a loving and supportive way. True love is an action. So self love, true self love, is loving and kind but acknowledges the issues and mountain hills left to climb, and climbs them.
Being fat isn’t worth shaming someone over, nor is it worth hating yourself. That piece of the movement is worthy and makes sense. You cannot change within yourself a part of you that you are too loathe to even look at in order to examine the issues underneath the mere presentation of fatness. Being fat, in most cases, is cause for concern regarding your health, and a self love movement should be one which encourages this introspection in the most loving way. It is no secret that obesity is linked to various serious health conditions. It has now been studies and affirmed that obesity is also linked to higher chances of developing certain cancers — and not just slightly more likely, many of the cancers show 50% increase in likelihood. The leading cause of death for 2018, 2019, and 2020 (and most likely many years prior) has been heart disease. Hypertension (high blood pressure) is “one of the most important risk factors for cardiovascular disease.” It has been studied and affirmed by scientists and various research studies such as this one, that obesity is a major risk factor for hypertension. Then take diabetes, which is also known as an independent risk factor to cardiovascular disease. This scientific article shows a direct link of obesity to diabetes, with a conclusion that a 7% fat loss based on total body weight, along with daily moderate activity of 30 minutes, can help mitigate the risk of diabetes, and therefore cardiovascular disease dramatically. Shouldn’t your health and longevity heavily outweigh the idea that you need to feel comfortable and happy in a bigger body, just so you don’t have to face negative feelings?
The body positive movement today, however, seeks no such thing, and rather tries to pretend being fat, or even obese, is no issue whatsoever. Enam Asiama is one example — this post being just one of they many, and just part of the caption under the photo is as follows:
“last of the summer whines — this year, I fell in love with my body the most. I put on weight, I made a conscious effort to notice this and it made me feel normal again. As I wanted this, since I have felt the most suffering with my mental health — so I was anxious and paranoid that I would lose weight because of it. But more than ever, I see myself again, as I stopped accepting the false romanticising of my body by myself, false lovers and by those systems that control beauty standards”
Tess Holiday is the one who came up with the hashtag “eff your beauty standards” to begin with.
Now, my goal in pointing these ladies out as examples is not to say they are not beautiful nor to say that they should not have a voice. Rather, to illustrate a point that the new wave of the body positive movement is encouraging women to forget about their health and settle for something that could potentially, and more than likely, cause them real harm. This movement is far from uplifting for women…in fact, it is turning around and discrediting the success and hard work women go through to lose an excessive amount of weight. Adele had a stunning weight loss achievement that was met with criticisms in applauding her success as fatphobia. Other articles included praising her weight loss as toxic — interestingly, this article claims that thinking of fat as bad and thin as good leaves no room for normal human bodies. But looking at a woman’s weight loss transformation, especially knowing how hard it can be to lose even just a few pounds, as anything but inspirational, seems to be closer to the all or nothing mindset the author is accusing people praising Adele as holding. Lastly, on Adele, take this Vogue article:
“Take what happened recently with British singer Adele, where people were praising her for her weight loss when it shouldn’t even be something people are discussing.”
Why not discuss something so effortful and so inspiring? This doesn’t take away any of her other accomplishments, but to say most people aren’t trying to lose weight is to live with your head in the sand. The diet industry, in 2018 grossed $72.7 billion. Inherently, people understand the importance of losing weight. So, knowing how hard it is to lose even a few pounds, this is a success to be lauded. One can even argue that her talent — her voice — is more based on luck than anything…there are millions of beautiful voices, talented singers, that never get recognized because they are not at the right place at the right time. Yet her weight loss is something she had to put all her effort on — it is something that luck couldn’t have given her.
Intersectionality and All-Or-Nothing Schemas enter the Body Positive Movement
The same article as mentioned above continues:
“So, how do we change this? One great thing that can help the movement along is allyship. People who live in privileged and smaller bodies can be a part of the body positivity movement by using their platforms and voices to uplift, retweet and reblog the thoughts, opinions and perspectives of voices who would otherwise not be heard, due to how they look. With their help, we can deconstruct the dangerous and harmful narratives about weight created by the media and diet industry.”
Fat is usually connotated as bad because it is, most times, unhealthy. There can be some genetic or medical condition in the very minority of cases which causes people to be overweight or obese, but mostly it is because we can’t get away from junk food and don’t like to exercise, which equals bad for our health. To claim the connotation itself as toxic is counterproductive, as the true toxicity lies in the chronic inflammation of overweight bodies which deteriorates the natural workings of our systems and lead them to break down.
To make matters worse, the BPM (body positive movement) has been just another way to add an “-ism” to the list, further alienating groups into their own tribes and unwittingly further breaking the bonds of an already frail society such as the one we find ourselves today in the United States. Focusing on an identity (color, age, gender, and now, size) and looking at the world through the lens of oppressors and the oppressed does not allow for any nuance — a very important nuance being health. As a free and just society, we should not be looking to actively “uplift, retweet, and reblog” people solely based on something physical. We should do so while treating people equally, regardless of anything physical (race, body size, disability, etc). None of those can point to the character of a person, so why give them validity in determining whether or not we should take someone seriously? Instead, listen to people without placing emphasis of any of what could become an “-ism” and decide to “uplift, retweet, reblog” based on the validity and morality of their character.
Look at Sonya Renee Taylor and another example, in a piece regarding her book “The Body Is Not An Apology.” In this book, she advocates for “radical self love,” and in this article goes on to say:
“Radical self-love is our inherent state of being as worthy and enough. It is the unobstructed access to our highest selves. Ultimately, I believe that if we’re not participating in radical self-love, then we are by default participating in body terror. If we don’t take intentional time to dismantle these negative ideas inside of ourselves, then we’re only going to reaffirm those ideas in the world. We will continue to build new themes based off of that belief — e.g. that fat is bad, that black is bad, that age is bad, that depressed is bad, and so on — unless we undo the belief altogether.”
To repeat her words, “if we’re not participating in radical self-love, then we are by default participating in body terror.” It is an either/or belief…nothing in between. You are either participating in radical self-love, dismantling the negative beliefs apparently put on to us by society by just being happy fat, or we are literally terrorizing ourselves with the negative thoughts of fatness. There is no room for any one to argue the negative side affects of being fat that have nothing to do with hate or discrimination — facts that have been validated, as discussed above.
Forgetting Science, Yet Again
To end, it would be remiss to not include evolution as part of the science being forgotten here. Humans are animals; we have evolved with high functioning brains, but that doesn’t mean we control all of our desires and inhibitions. If you stop to really think about it, most aspects of your personality, your likes and dislikes, were not conscious choices. You cannot choose to like brussels sprouts out of sheer will. You can’t help who you are attracted to, and it is naive and egotistical to believe an individual — or even a movement — can overcome the evolutionary propensity to the attraction of a thinner frame. One of this study’s results is exactly that- “Low waist-hip ratio is sexually attractive in women and indicates a high estrogen/testosterone ratio (which favors reproductive function).” Another scientific analysis you can read in full here goes into much detail on the evolution of attraction, and a few of the facts they cite are:
- Individuals in superior condition may make better mates for a variety of reasons: fitter genes to pass on to offspring (e.g., a relative absence of mildly harmful mutations; Houle 1992); greater ability to provide material benefits such as protection or food; greater fertility and ability to reproduce (e.g., more viable sperm in the case of males or greater ability to www.annualreviews.org • Evolution and Physical Attraction 527 Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2005.34:523–548. Downloaded from arjournals.annualreviews.org by University of Queensland on 05/12/09. For personal use only. AR254-AN34–26 ARI 25 August 2005 15:11 conceive and carry offspring through gestation and lactation in the case of females); and a relative absence of disease. General models of signals of quality do not speak to the precise nature of the benefits associated with choosing a mate of superior quality, though researchers are often interested in determining these benefits.
- It now appears that, across a wide variety of cultures (though see below), men do prefer a lower-than-average WHR (most preferred typically being about 0.7, compared to a mean in most populations of about 0.75– .80; e.g., Singh 1993, 1994a,b; Singh & Luis 1995; compare Tassinary & Hansen 1998, but see Streeter & McBurney 2003). The primary benefit of this preference may ancestrally have been the same as a benefit of 536 Gangestad · Scheyd Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2005.34:523–548. Downloaded from arjournals.annualreviews.org by University of Queensland on 05/12/09. For personal use only. AR254-AN34–26 ARI 25 August 2005 15:11 a preference for feminine faces: Low WHRs reflect a history of energy balance and flux that promotes allocation of energy into reproductive effort.
- Tiggemann & Kenyon (1998) describe a youthful feminine look as including a slim body, high taut breasts, and smooth hairless skin. Dieting, exercise programs, weight loss surgeries and medications, breast augmentation and reduction surgeries, liposuction, electrolysis, and shaving can be variously mixed and matched to achieve such an appearance
It is not ok to be fat despite the current movement trying to normalize it. It is not ok to be fat not because fat people are not beautiful (because they can be, just like skinny people can be ugly); not because fat people are “morally inferior” — that’s absolutely asonine; not because fat people don’t deserve a voice — in a land of freedom, everyone has a voice and the only one usually holding a person back is the person themselves. It is not ok to be fat because it is simply not healthy. It is not conducive to a long life, free of potential limitations from joint pain, cardiovascular health, shortness of breath, diabetes, etc, etc. If the goal is to empower people and, given the movement, empower women specifically, we should be working to empower them in ways that will enrich their lives instead of cutting them short. Feeling bad about being fat isn’t the worst thing that can happen — dying from it is. Feelings, and life, are not always positive. We have become so uncomfortable and unwilling to look to the dark and painful parts of life that we make up destructive narratives such as this one just so we don’t feel the negative thoughts. We can run away from the issue and pretend it does not exist, but that is the thing about life - no matter how fast you run, the truth will always meet up with you in the end.
Till next time,
-Sensible Pub
