Five Body Positive Sayings (That Aren’t Body Positive At All)

Here’s the thing about your attitude to body image: It’s contagious.

Trust me, I know. As someone who’s dealt with major body image problems, I notice these attitudes more than many.

Of course, this isn’t to say that people around me are deliberately trying to add to a negative culture. It’s done honestly – we all want to be healthy and attractive, and we can easily buy into the ideas that the media sells about what it takes to get that way.

It’s also not to say that people around me are deliberately being misleading – because after all, there’s a lot of confusion around what body positivity is. For every person who is posting “body positive” content with a candid selfie, there are others who are using the hashtag to sell smoothies or fitness clothes.

But the truth is, the attitudes of people around us do play a major role in helping each of us see the marketing ploys and faux beauty standards for what they are.

My concern is that many of us are so steeped in diet culture that we don’t even realise when we’re saying unhelpful things.

Here are some examples.

“You’re not fat, you’re beautiful”

First, this suggests that being “fat” and being beautiful can’t co-exist in the same person.

Second, this phrase can often be directed at people who are genuinely concerned about their weight. We assume “fat” is so terrible that no person we like can or should be worried about their weight. In fact, it’s a fair health concern which can lead to all sorts of issues, and only points to our fear of people who are “big”.

(Weirdly, telling our friends “they’re not fat, they’re beautiful” doesn’t tend to stop us from obsessing over our own weight.)

It’s worth pointing out that this goes on both sides of the equation. Losing weight to be thinner than you should be is also not body positive. Body positivity is about caring for the body you have.

“Real women have curves”

Many – perhaps most – women are larger than the models you see in magazines.

But “real women have curves” stems from the same thinking as “real women are skinny models”. It’s saying that women’s bodies need to look a certain way to be valuable. It’s also implying that thin women shouldn’t be positive about their bodies.

The truth is that real women come in all shapes and sizes. They are all heights, skin tones, weights, shapes, ages and abilities. Real women identify as women. The end.

“Bad foods” and “good foods”

We’re in a time of juice cleanses, ditching carbs and quitting sugar. It’s definitely trendy to get righteous about the foods we eat.

But how helpful is it? Research suggests that forbidding a food that we enjoy usually makes us crave it more. It’s also been found that people who are deprived of a food tend to consume more calories of it when they do consume it, as compared to those who don’t.

Giving up certain foods may be helpful, but labelling them “naughty” is probably less productive than simply saying, “I’m going to eat this only once a week instead of three times.”

“Beach body”

This one I associate with supermarket aisle magazines, bidding you to “look hot for summer”.

But in practice, “beach body” usually means… well… thin. Fit. “Acceptable” by certain standards. The subtext of this one is that you need to look a certain way or you shouldn’t be allowed on the beach.

Shouldn’t my “beach body” just be my body on a beach? Who says I need to look a certain way to do that?

“Strong is the new skinny”

Focusing on building muscle, instead of whittling your waist, may sound fitspirational, motivational, and even like it’s a healthy alternative.

But in practice, this is just replacing on aesthetic (slender) with a new one (muscly). The problem isn’t just with thin as an ideal – the problem is with dictating an ideal that everyone is measured by.

(And for the record, being muscly can be as much of a sign of an eating disorder as being thin.)

Does this seem like an exercise in semantics? Maybe, but words are powerful. They can build up and tear down, and when we notice how our words impact ourselves and others, we can change them.

What really matters is that you – I – we don’t have to take those external voices at face value. We have voices too – and when we know how, we can talk back into the culture that’s – literally – trying to shape us.