Body Positive Power

Hating our bodies is something that we learn, and it sure as hell is something that we can unlearn.

We can’t see the beauty in everything that we are because we’ve been taught to first see everything that we’re not.

It's genius, really: saturate the media with ideal bodies, convince women that they can only be happy if they look like those bodies, sell women products promising to give them those bodies, and when those products don't work, tell the women that it's their fault for not having enough willpower, and sell them more. If women begin to achieve the current ideal body, change the ideal so that they'll need to keep buying products (that don't work) to attain the impossible. Rinse and repeat. They go home rolling in their billions and we're left with shattered self-esteem, empty bank accounts, wasted years, and useless products, and we still blame ourselves instead of seeing it for the manipulation that it is. And all along the whole thing rests on that one big lie, that your body needs to look a certain way in order for you to be happy. We bought it. We still buy it.

It doesn't really matter how you look in [family holiday] pictures, it just matters that you're there.

We want absolutely all bodies to be celebrated and idolised, represented and glorified.

Detoxing is nonsense, it's a complete fallacy that the body needs to detox. Removal of waste products and toxins is a continuous process and we don't need to periodically flush them out. The body does a perfectly good job of eliminating any substances on its own. The entire concept of needing to detoxify, purify, or cleanse your body with these regimes is literally made up by the diet industry to sell us more shit (that doesn't work) to fix our bodies (that don't need fixing).

And if you’re thinking that 26,000 excess deaths associated with being overweight and obese seems like a lot, bear in mind that in the same year 34,000 deaths were associated with being underweight—where are the screaming headlines about that?

Kate Moss famously said that “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” So I thought I’d put together a little list of things she’s obviously never tried before that taste so much better than buying into an oppressive body ideal could ever feel: Pasta, pizza, mangoes, avocados, doughnuts, peanut butter, sushi, bacon, chocolate cake, lemon cake, any cake really, blueberries, garlic bread, smoked salmon, poached eggs, apples, roast dinners, cookie dough, sweet potatoes, whipped cream, freshly squeezed orange juice, watermelon, gelato, paella, oh and cheese. You’re welcome, Kate!

There are already millions of places to go if you want to celebrate weight loss. There are countless online spaces dedicated to dieting where you’ll be cheered on every pound of the way. You can still talk about food diaries and dropped dress sizes with 99 percent of the population. Is it really too much to ask that we preserve one space away from it? One part of our lives that diet culture can’t get its hands on? Body positivity is that space.

The physiological effects of hunger alone stop us from fully engaging in the world and reaching our full potential. Our bodies and brains just don't function properly when they're deprived of nourishment. And since diet culture has been aimed primarily at women for the past 100 years, hunger could be seen as one of the most effective tools for suppressing female advancement. It keeps us thinking about things like waistlines and sugar substitutes rather than the need for social, political, and economic equality. Which is what led Wolf to famously write, "Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history." In other words, we cannot take on the world while we're hungry.

I wish for that time back. All that time that was supposed to be about discovering the world and who I was became wasted on making myself smaller and smaller. Imagine if we all stopped expending so much energy on trying to change our bodies. We could do anything we dreamed of. We could get shit done.

As soon as we were born into a culture that's willing to sacrifice half the population's mental health in order to turn a profit, we were screwed. From day one.

We need to stop believing that our bodies exist in the world just to be looked at by other people. Our bodies are not objects; we're not inanimate pieces of art hanging in a museum for people to gaze at and critique.

And since diet culture has been aimed primarily at women for the past 100 years, hunger could be seen as one of the most effective tools for suppressing female advancement. It keeps us thinking about things like waistlines and sugar substitutes rather than the need for social, political, and economic equality. Which is what led Wolf to famously write, “Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history.” In other words: we cannot take on the world while we’re hungry.

Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history.

Without a doubt, what the war on obesity has created the most of is stigma. It has turned fatness into the ultimate moral sin and given the public a medically motivated reason to bully, harass, and discriminate against someone based on their size.

Obesity research is almost solely funded by the weight-loss industry. Conducting studies is expensive, and government funds don’t even begin to cover them all. Luckily, our good friend the diet industry is there to give millions to studies aiming to prove that fat is killing us, meaning that in turn their sales go through the roof as we all run, terrified, to our nearest weight-loss group.

When we go to the beach and bare our skin, we’re not there to be visually appealing to others. We’re there to feel the sand, hear the waves, smell the salt, take in the view. We’re there to make memories. The dimples on our thighs or whether another beachgoer disapproves of our size is irrelevant. It’s not why we’re there. Being aesthetically pleasing is not the purpose of our existence.

Let's get real about the ideal. It sucks. It doesn't represent us, and it doesn't even try to. It refuses to acknowledge that people of all sizes, shapes, ages, skin colors, genders and abilities exist and are worthy of being seen, heard, and valued.

A war on obesity that teaches people to hate themselves in the name of health is useless. Campaigning for help while ignoring the harm the campaign has inflicted on those who it's supposedly trying to help, is senseless. And aiming to improve people's physical health with methods that actively destroy those people's mental health, is so obviously backwards that I have no idea how people aren't seeing it.

Why does beauty have to be pain?

Who wants an identity that's built on a calorie count?

We can't see the beauty in everything that we are because we've been taught to first see everything that we're not.

We still believe after all this time that if we hate ourselves enough we'll end up loving ourselves.

Fat people are the last remaining group that it’s socially accepted, in fact, socially encouraged, to be prejudiced against. Plenty of people who wouldn’t dream of bullying someone based on the colour of their skin or their level of physical ability will be the first to crack a fat joke and revel in their moral superiority.

In 2013, the Journal of the American Medical Association published the results of a study that aimed to find, once and for all, the link between mortality rates and BMI (a.k.a. is our fat really killing us?). The study was led by Katherine Flegal, an epidemiologist at the National Center for Health Statistics, and her colleagues. After analyzing ninety-seven studies of mortality rates and BMI that included almost 3 million people, Flegal found what’s known as a “U-shaped curve.” At the top ends of the curve, where death rates were the highest, are people whose BMIs categorize them as either severely underweight or severely obese. At the lowest point of the curve, where death rates are the lowest, are people whose BMI falls within the “overweight” category. Meaning that statistically, people who are overweight according to BMI had the lowest risk of death. Following the U-shaped curve, people whose BMI fell within the “mildly obese” category had no higher risk of death than people within the “normal” category. The increased mortality rate came at the extremes, either side.

Linda Bacon exposes some of the rarely mentioned side effects of weight-loss surgery in Health at Every Size, listing a shocking eighty-two symptoms, including lifelong vitamin deficiency, loss of bowel control, consistent vomiting and excruciating pain after eating, hormone imbalances, infection, kidney and liver failure, nerve and brain damage, and often, weight regain. Bacon cites further studies that found that 4.6 percent of bariatric surgery patients died within a year. She argues that weight-loss surgery “would be more appropriately labelled ‘high-risk disease-inducing cosmetic surgery’ than a health-enhancing procedure.

Did you know that some of the most widely held “truths” about health and weight are just plain made up? And that even when some “facts” about obesity turn out to be completely inaccurate, they’re still printed in news media and stuck in our minds as truth?

people who provide most of the information on health and weight are far less reliable than we think they are.