Aahana Katti 

Professor Heather Sottong

Academic Writing

20th September 2022

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The Consequences of the Body Positivity Movement

Over the years, the ideal “body image” in the media has changed greatly. The factors considered when determining beauty standards ranged from ideal waist size to shape of eyebrows. These standards have evolved and developed gradually, getting more unrealistic and impractical. In the early 2010s, there was a rise of a new movement which aimed to get rid of these confines of beauty. The Body Positivity Movement as it was called, aimed to celebrate our bodies in their natural form and accept the natural flaws they come with (Cohen). For the last two decades, feminists, nutritionsits and, doctors have all fought to removed toxic body standards and promote health over all else. This essay aims to look at the movement with an objective eye and question its impact. I argue that while the Body Positivity Movement has brought a lot of acceptance and introduced new perspectives to the issue of health and size, it also resulted in toxic ideas of body image. 

This movement has become an umbrella term for issues concerning body acceptance, and many initiatives have been introduced to take this idea forward. For example in January 2021, the popular magazine ‘Cosmopolitan’ released a series of covers with the slogan ‘Health at Every Size’. These covers feature several women of different sizes who were also the magazine claimed, perfectly healthy. This generated a lot of discourse online, particularly about the correlation between weight and health. This initiative was an extension of the Body Positivity Movement, attempting to remove stigma from plus-sized women. This has scientific backing since health does not necessarily correlate with weight. The ideal weight of an individual can vary based on their race, gender and pre-existing health issues (Salles). It was intended to change the expectation of only having Size 0 models on magazine covers. However it received a lot of backlash because many believed it was generally inaccurate since health was not possible at “every size”. People who are either underweight or overweight need to change their lifestyle in order to maintain a good standard of living. However, defenders of the Cosmopolitan issue seemed to propagate the idea that healthy living had no correlation to weight. Doctors of many fields also argued that this could set a dangerous precedent for people who do not understand the complete science behind weight issues and its impacts. This is an example of some aspects of the Body Positivity Movement that have morphed into blind support instead of healthy argument. Anyone who tried to argue against these covers was labeled “fat-phobic” (a term which is used to describe the aversion to or discrimination against obese people) their opinion was therefore invalidated. This leads to a narrow-minded approach to this movement since its members are not willing to listen to any arguments against their ideas. 

A consequence of the Body Positivity  movement has been the “Anti-Fitness Rally” which is a group of people who believe that weight loss and all of its components are unnecessary and toxic. This sentiment is usually only discussed online and is popular on social media platforms. They argue that fitness regimes and diet culture are inherently bad for health. The problem with this is that people who have this mind-set see no room for improvement in their current diet or lifestyle and use body positivity as an excuse to continue their unhealthy behaviors. While it is true that this was not the intention of the movement, many have stretched its core message to mean all bodies should be left the way they are. In my own experience, a classmate once claimed “Going to the gym is fatphobic and unnecessary” in response to my friend trying to balance his diet and exercise regularly. One can see how these ideas are harmful and encourage false notions of health. Dr. Salles, a bariatric surgeon says it best in an interview, “I am anti-fat bias, anti-fat shaming but knowing the consequences of being overweight is not fatphobic,” (Mike, 0:45 - 1:00) This shows how the Body Positivity Movement needs to shift, taking into consideration the limits to accepting your body in its natural form. 

As the Body Positivity Movement has evolved people started seeing the faults surrounding this phrase. Many argued that while unrealistic body standards should and can be removed, the goal should be for people to live comfortably with their bodies instead of obsessing over it. This sparked a new movement called Body Neutrality which focused on the intangible aspects of our issues with body acceptance (Shenoy). While the Body Positivity Movement is focused around feeling beautiful, this new mind-set is less vanity driven. Another disadvantage with the Body Positivity Movement was that it highlighted “fat-liberation” which promoted removing stigma from fat people. However, there are many other issues regarding weight that it did not give importance to. For example, most Body Positivity influencers did not mention the societal expectations placed on men regarding their physique. It also ignores the plight of people who were underweight or suffering from eating disorders. Body Neutrality aims to eliminate these problems by removing all biases around weight and size. In my opinion the problem lies in how people perceive these various issues. For example, Body Positivity has been given a certain by social media but can be understood in different ways. For example in her essay ‘What is Body Positivity?’, Céline Lebouf writes “Beyond challenging confining beauty standards, body positivity should teach us that all bodies are worthy - of care and respect,”.  This suggests that the importance while talking about such issues lies in its core values and how it is shared with the world. 

One of the greatest mistakes of the Body Positivity Movement is who it chooses to blame for the crux of the problem. Prior to 2019, models were regarded as the worst of the fashion industry perpetuating unrealistic body standards and pushing unhealthy lifestyles on an impressionable audience. However, an investigation into the brand Victoria’s Secret revealed the harsh conditions under which these models were operating. They were forced by brand managers to look a certain way or risk losing their jobs. As it turns out, they were just as much victims of the unrealistic expectation as any of us. While Body Positivity Influencers admonished them for their looks they were facing unbelievable pressures to attain these standards. This is an example where the movement was blinded by its agenda and propagated false ideas of how the cycle of abuse concerning weight works. The movement was inherently biased towards promoting plus-sized women instead of removing the bias from all women. Because of this the movement failed to address some issues which needed to be addressed by a community focused on body acceptance. This also shows how the issue of weight and health can be an extremely personal problem and the solution can be different for every individual. Any attempt made to cover these complex issues in broad strokes could be detrimental since it would not reflect the needs of any one individual. 

In conclusion, the Body Positivity Movement has seen some fundamental problems with the manner in which it communicated its core values. This essay examines situations in which it has morphed branches creating uninformed ideas and convictions. While dealing with issues related to health and its factors, there are too many elements to consider. It also usually includes matters of high complexity which would be known by a physician and not a social media influencer. In its attempt to appeal to a larger audience the Body Positivity Movement has in some cases become a false representation of what body acceptance should be. The solutions to this lie in creating a deeper understanding of what our bodies reflect in terms of health. As a society, we need to become more accepting of the gaps that lie between individual needs and generalized norms.  

 

Work Cited 

Leboeuf, Céline. “What Is Body Positivity? The Path from Shame to Pride.” Philosophical Topics, vol. 47, no. 2, 2019, pp. 113–28. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26948109. 

Shenoy, Devika “Body Positivity vs Body Neutrality - What is better?” The Jewel Review, 16 September 2022, https://thejewelreview.com/2021/09/16/body-positivity-vs-body-neutrality-which-is-better/

Robison, Jon “Health at Every Size: Toward a New Paradigm of Weight and Health”, National Library of Medicine, 12 July 2005, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1681635/

Cohen, Rachel “#bodypositivity: A content analysis of body positive accounts on Instagram”, Science Direct, June 2019, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1740144518304595

Salles, Arghavan “Can Big be Healthy? Yes – and No”, Medscape, 19 January 2021, https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/944165

Varshavski, Mike “Doctors React to Controversial Cosmo Cover” Youtube, Uploaded by Doctor Mike, 7 February 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyMyocRiw9M