Body Positivity
By: Natural Is Beautiful
Tags: Ngo, Illustration, Body Positive, Body Image, Nonprofit Marketing

I remember everyone talking about diets and only the thinnest of girls were deemed beautiful and we had to strive to be like them. The fastest way for me to lose weight was by listening to misguided advice of eating less. I would have my snack and dump my lunch into the dumpsters before returning home, or flush it down the toilet. Yet, I still occupied way too much surface area for my liking, or the collective group of friends I hung out with then.

It wasn’t years later until I reached college that I was truly comfortable indulging in food without any guilt, but even then I still felt the need to modestly hide my body and only stare in envy at those who could wear what they pleased. It was as though I had an impenetrable barrier in my mind that forbade me wearing certain clothes. And god forbid if I ever had a shirt or a dress with horizontal stripes instead of vertical ones. I even abhorred wearing dresses all because of one comment on my prepubescent body and how pudgy my thighs looked.

My experience growing up as a healthy kid wasn’t an isolated one, and even finding people to share the experience with, didn’t lessen the blow of the harsh words thrown around like “thoda wazan kam karlo toh sahi lagega” or “Abhi seh pa’er bhari ho gaye kya” and countless other quips from ‘well-meaning’ society aunties.

The quintessential fat-shaming experience in Indian schools is getting your BMI measured (it is the equivalent of American fitness tests) in which you’d have you height and weight measured by the school nurse who’d announce your BMI to essentially your whole class following it up with an after-thought of eat less , exercise more. The issue with this is BMI which has been praised as the gold-standard for gauging whether a patient is healthy and they also forget to mention that it has been used for over a 100 years and is very clearly outdated. In fact it can be inaccurate in estimating body fat and doesn’t provide a full picture of a person’s health. Research also shows that relying on BMI alone to predict a person’s risk of health problems can be misleading. And neither does it take into account a person’s body fat percentage as exhibited here in a social experiment by Cassey Ho. But these were facts that my 13 year old self, that used to go often to swim meets and was an avid swimmer, did not know. And it was after that I quit swimming for awhile because I never saw my body as an Instagram worthy swimsuit body.

And that was something that was also gripping my current generation. While a year ago most people could push aside the perfect Instagram body images by knowing and interacting with people outside their screens. For more than a year now, most of us have been relegated to our screens constantly surrounded by perfect bodies day in and day out that soon takes a toll on our perceptions of our bodies and how they should be. In fact there’s been a study showing that even spending 7 minutes browsing Instagram decreased college women’s body satisfaction. There have even been studies showing disordered eating habits and impact on body image due to social media. So while on the one hand Instagram was detrimental it was also the foothold body positivity needed to get out it’s message into the wider world. And the way it has evolved on the internet from being something that was inclusive of plus size women to something that thin influencers use to show that stomachs can bloat up. But where exactly did body positivity come from?

According to the BBC news, It actually began with the Fat Rights Movement in two different halves of the United States, in the 1970s, and released something called a Fat Manifesto which demanded equal rights for fat people in all areas of life. The movement continued to grow with fat liberation being spread across the globe with the formation of the London Fat Women’s Group. By the early 2000s, with the rising popularity of the internet it became a place where body shame and body love were dueled. As the anonymity allowed both for self-expression and bullying from hashtags to forums. But the internet hadn’t created as strong of a foothold as the widely accepted media of communication- the Television.

‘How you doin '?’ We are all aware of this refrain from the classic sitcom F.R.I.E.N.D.S. The picture perfect Monica, Phoebe and Rachel were the epitome of female beauty standards during the era that their viewers had tried to emulate. The idea that losing weight could make you more attractive was further propelled by the character of Monica who underwent ‘tremendous weight loss’ and became attractive to people who had previously rejected her. Though it was a comedic show it had a far-reaching on it’s young and impressionable viewers. This was just one of the many shows airing around at that time that took a jab at fat people.

It was only in the 2010’s that we see Fat visibility happening and creators such as Lizzo being outspoken about their support and alliance toward the movement, and this is when we truly see the Body Positivity Movement take shape, through hashtags and campaigns. It however has evolved over time and has grown to encompass various issues such as acceptance of body hair, texture, skin, scars and so forth. We see the words, body love and body positivity, being used by every weight loss/diet company and influencers that have imperfect bodies when their stomachs bloat because they have food in them have essentially taken over the hashtag.

And in all of this we see the original message of the movement and the people it was supposed to cover which were plus-size creators and influencers being essentially overshadowed.

And among all of this there has also been talk of embracing body positivity essentially promoting an unhealthy lifestyle and being an excuse for Fat People to be lazy. But for the naysayers, the body positivity movement wasn’t about health in the first it was always about normalizing the different bodies that you’d see and help women in creating a more positive body image. In most cases when we look at a healthy or plus-size woman out, we generally tend to judge them as being unhealthy or not taking care of their body. And that’s the kind of image that Body Positivity wanted to curb. It was the idea of a person’s body being larger automatically meaning that they were lazy. However, we don’t know the kind of struggles a person may have gone through or any of their underlying conditions or even hormonal issues that they may have that would make it harder to lose weight. Regardless of everything else, a healthy weight doesn’t look like washboard abs for everyone.

The kind of thinking of larger body size being an indicator of health has also seeped into the healthcare system where we see that most doctors’s refuse to treat patients over a certain weight or misdiagnose them and say common phrases like ”Your issues could be solved if you lost some weight”. This can be pretty detrimental in the case of patient’s of that size with eating disorders, as they can be very easily dismissed.

And sadly most plus size people aren’t told to diet or lose weight in a medically healthy way rather it’s the popularized diets and a chronic culture of starving and disordered eating that’s generally recommended. Most people generally resort to extreme methods of losing weight to look like the people we see on the big screens who’ve probably spent millions of dollars tailoring each aspect of their body to look aesthetically pleasing. And even women who have a bit of stomach fat or rolls while sitting are prodded and hounded by gym instructors to virtual influencers telling them that they’re simply horrendous.

The one entity that has profited off the whole fiasco has been the diet industry (also termed as the wellness industry) which is estimated at about a whopping 71 Million Dollars. Yet about 95% of diets you’d try in your lifetime would mostly fail, this is not because people can’t follow diets religiously, but because of biological reasons. Most studies have found that most diets while providing people with their desired outcomes for the first few months have practically no effect by the end of the year. A similar study that followed people on long term diets showed that more than 50 percent of the lost weight was regained within two years. And within 5 years more than 80% of the weight was regained.

As Lindsey Kate put it in her TED talk “ Lots of well-meaning people and companies have worked to improve women’s body image by pushing the message that ‘all women are beautiful flaws and all’ that’s because girls and women aren’t only suffering because of the unattainable ways beauty is being defined they are suffering because they are being defined by beauty. They are bodies first and people second. ”