Why You Need Body Neutrality, Not Body Positivity

It’s impossible to pinpoint when I started having a negative perception of my body, but it’s unsurprising to me that I can trace these negative thoughts as far back as being four years old. 

Despite the lack of social media, the early 2000s was a minefield for anyone trying to have a more positive relationship with their body. Fad diets were as “in” as they’ve ever been, with more non-fat and low-calorie options than ever. If you were ever subjected to those 100-calorie snack packs, you may be entitled to financial compensation. 

Don’t even get me started about NBC’s The Biggest Loser, which boasted over 11.7 million viewers at its height. Not to mention, tabloids with entire issues dedicated to “THIS YEAR'S WORST BEACH BODIES!” (always in all caps) next to pictures of women at the beach who happen to have cellulite. 

It’s no wonder  so many of us have struggled with having anything but a negative perception of our bodies—and why so many people have grown up to be fatphobic. 

Enter body positivity.

The Body Positive Movement

Body positivity isn’t a new idea. If you’ve spent any amount of time on the internet over the last decade, you’ve definitely encountered some form of content related to the body positivity movement. 

If you’re like me, you’ve spent hours learning all there is to know about the topic, and you’vemade many unsuccessful attempts to implement body positivity in your daily life. 

You’ve probably written down some affirmations on sticky notes and stuck them to your mirror, and repeated “I love my body” until you’re blue in the face. Then you wake up the next day feeling the exact same about your body. Rinse and repeat. 

Unfortunately, many of us are all too familiar with this cycle. Despite the massive amount of body positive content at our fingertips, the prevalence of eating disorders more than doubled between 2000 and 2018  (from 3.4% to 7.8% of all people). There are countless complicated reasons for the dramatic increase of that number, but one thing seems to be clear: body positivity isn’t helping the way we thought it would.

Jessi Kneeland, author of Body Neutral: A Revolutionary Guide to Overcoming Body Image Issues writes, “Frankly, the social media version of body positivity doesn’t work. Despite the extraordinary popularity of the idea that we should all feel good about our bodies, here we are over a decade after the concept’s mainstream rise, and body image issues haven’t become any less common, intense, or destructive to people’s lives.”

So, what’s the alternative? 

Enter Body Neutrality

I was first introduced to the concept of body neutrality when a friend recommended Bethany C. Meyers’ I Am More Than My Body. Admittedly, I was skeptical. 

Body neutrality felt like a repackaged version of body positivity, which hadn’t been working for me. What I ended up discovering was different than what I expected. 

If we think of how we feel about our bodies as a spectrum, body neutrality is the middle ground. At its core, body neutrality asks us to disentangle who we are from what we look like. It gives us an invitation to simply accept our body without the pressure of having to love every stretch mark. 

What I find most challenging about body neutrality is that it requires us to not only recognize our own social conditioning, but to question it. For me, this meant uncovering some internal biases that I had against larger bodies. 

Did I truly believe that being thinner would make me more deserving of love and respect? Or had I been conditioned to correlate the two? What would it look and feel like to stop thinking about my body as anything more than an independent vessel? 

Kneeland writes “[Body neutrality] helps us strip away the many layers of complex social conditioning telling us what different bodies mean, so we can see this clear and objective truth: that beauty and attractiveness can be pleasant and nice, but they can’t tell you anything about a person’s character, personality, lifestyle, or the kind of life and treatment they deserve.”

Compassion is Key

Compassion toward self is one of the most important pillars of body neutrality. The diet industry is a $72 billion empire that relies on us to hate our bodies, or at the very least, subscribe to the idea that being thinner is a one-size-fits all approach to achieving happiness. 

While it’s true that thin people afford privileges not often experienced by people in larger bodies, the brief ego boost experienced from those privileges won’t deliver the kind of joy that truly sustains us. 

At the same time, we must have compassion for all parts of ourselves—even the part that might still be trying to convince us that all of this is floofy bullshit made up by some therapist who probably doesn’t have body-image issues. 

We must have compassion for the parts of us that are scared to face the grief of change. The parts that cling onto old beliefs and familiar patterns. The parts of ourselves we’d rather not look in the eyes.

Changing the Goalposts

When it comes down to it, achieving complete and total body neutrality is unlikely. There will always be parts of us that are tuned into our social conditioning. With that being said, there’s a pathway to a version of you who doesn’t spend as much time thinking about what your body looks like. 

The time you spent thinking about what your body looks like might instead be spent thinking about what your body does for you. You have a heart that beats, which serves as the baseline for a myriad of other bodily functions, everything timed so perfectly and automatically that you don’t even have to think about taking your next breath before it just happens. 

It’s time to change the goalpost. 

You don’t have to love your body to live a full life, but coming to a place of peace and acceptance with your body could be the framework for a more authentic version of yourself. 

And if we owe ourselves anything, it's the chance to live wholeheartedly and authentically.