What is Body Neutrality?
What does it mean to be body positive?
The stance against diet culture and the thin ideal started with the body positivity movement, which promotes self love and pride in the body, no matter the shape or size. In recent years this movement has made headway in normalizing bodies that don’t match society’s thin ideal. Body positive individuals empower themselves and others to love their bodies at any size.
What’s great about the body positive movement is that it elucidates how outdated standards set by the media and by society are. This movement highlights how the idea that thin = healthy and beautiful has long run its course, and that we need to start appreciating the beauty in diversity. The body positive movement also conveys an important principle that health does not equate to waistline; you can eat healthy, exercise, and be at your healthy body weight without being ultra-thin.
Influencers and media moguls make being body positive look so easy. But what does being body positive look like in real life?
In reality, achieving body positivity doesn’t always come naturally. This is especially true if your current relationship with your body isn’t a good one. For most, negative self-talk cannot immediately switch to positive self-talk. Just like any other habit, changing the way we talk to ourselves can’t happen all at once—it takes time and happens in small steps.
This is where body neutrality comes in.
Body neutrality is a relatively new movement in response to the body positive movement. The body neutrality movement caters to the vast majority who find it difficult to transition to positive self-talk.
Instead of promoting self-love, the body neutrality movement promotes body acceptance. Being body neutral means learning neither to love nor hate our bodies, but to accept them as they are. Being body neutral means appreciating our bodies and what they can do for us despite any negative or positive feelings we might have towards them.
Sometimes it’s easier to learn to accept and appreciate before we learn to love, especially if love is not our natural instinct. Using statements that do not have positive or negative modifiers attached, and pointing out how you can appreciate a certain part of the body can help you achieve body neutral self talk. Instead of body positive self-talk like “I love the shape of my hips and thighs,” an easier statement for someone to accept might be “Ok, my hips and thighs look like this, as do many other individuals’ hips and thighs. My hips and thighs help me move…” and so on.
Body neutral language can translate into other areas of health, too. For example, maybe one day you did not have the energy to exercise as you usually do, or maybe you didn’t exercise at all. Instead of self-talk like “I didn’t move enough today,” try “I was able to move my body today” or “today my body needed a break.”
The same goes for food. Maybe you’ll be indulging in all the good stuff this holiday season. Instead of statements like “I ate badly” or “I ate too many bad foods” and fueling guilt, try reforming the statement to “I ate food that I enjoyed and I get to eat with family and friends every year.”
Learning to accept our bodies as they are can help eliminate the negative thoughts we might have about ourselves. Erasing negative attitudes towards ourselves is the first step to building a healthier relationship with our bodies. Once we can accept our bodies and understand how they can help us, we can begin to transition to more positive language.
For some, staying body neutral is all they need to feel more free. This is ok! You don’t need to always be thinking positively about your body to have a healthy relationship with it. Sometimes there might be setbacks where positivity just doesn’t fit. This is where resetting and thinking neutrally, accepting and moving on can help.
At Abigail Nutrition, we focus on achieving body neutrality. We believe that health comes from diet and exercise, but that it also comes from within. How we feel about ourselves directly impacts our health. Acceptance and appreciation is what we strive for, and we work on it little by little until clients feel just a little more empowered and free than they did before.
For more information on counseling options and to learn more about having a healthy relationship with your body, schedule your free discovery call!
By Jessica Kaplan