Body Positivity popped up mid 2010's and has since been replaced by body neutrality for the most part. Do people generally see this as the trend or do many still hold onto body positivity in some circles, or none at all. Curious to know people's experiences with the two concepts and share my own take.
Body positivity always left a bad taste in my mouth because it felt like a juvenile response to the social pressure of diet culture that many millennials/old gen z had to deal with. It came from a good place, but it felt like it was actively fighting back by inverting what society considers beautiful instead of just trying to dismantle the idea that everyone needs to be conventionally attractive. It rung hollow to me because it really was not capable of changing societal norms, only the interactions within the specific body positivity group. So, you'd hear one thing from this support group (omg girl your beautiful!) and another from the whole of society (the same old same old). Maybe helpful for some but i saw a LOT of push-back that practically meant larger women just living their life would be MORE targeted for obesity than ever before.
The other side of this was the health at every size groups. They now made what was supposed to be a societal reclamation of beauty ideals into scientific consensus that health was not determined by weight. Which weirdly was still accepting the normative concept that health means "good", just redefining what was actually healthy. This only made the adversarial situation worse as any attempts at self-confidence through body positivity was now rife with the arguments of health or not. As a daughter of a long history of nurses, I do not take kindly to junk science and not taking our obesity crisis seriously, its killing people. We needed to shake off the damage from the 90's but this was not the way to do it.
Overall, I think body positivity was a psychological tool people with destroyed self-worth and confidence (thanks 90's) used to actively try to fix their psyche. But in doing so made everything involved in it a black or white in-out group situation that in some circles actively discouraged any self-improvement (weight or otherwise).
Body neutrality by comparison is NOT trying to change the beauty standard, its' saying the beauty standard is not your problem to bother with. In that way it doesn't feel forced and fabricated. It's focusing on what your body can do for you and accepting it as it is in your own mind. But unlike body positivity, it accepts growth and change. It encourages you to take better care of yourself. It doesn't try to reject the science that obesity causes health problems. It tries to focus on your humanity and reasonable expectations. Its ultimately what I think the body positive movement should have been; mental healing for a damaged generation that had such a terrible relationship with their food, exercise and their body.
I hope the next step is community-based healing and a collective push to better our world for easier health management. Subsidies on fruit/vegetable, more stores for food deserts, more easily available healthier food at more stores, more walking/bike paths. We need the next push from individual based responsibilities to community driven ones.
Whats ya'lls take?
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from loseit - Lose the Fat https://www.reddit.com/r/loseit/comments/18o3ify/whats_peoples_thoughts_on_body_positivitybody/
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