Why Body Positivity is a Negative For Me

I remember the moment when I first saw a fat woman loving herself on my instagram feed and just feeling a cloud shatter. Here was a beautiful woman who wasn’t afraid to be fat. She was everything that I felt the world had told me my whole life not to be and that I had told myself my whole life that I couldn’t be. Here was a woman who was fat, sexy and happy about it. I had found the body positivity movement and I fell in love.

I started to follow #bodypositivity and I found loads more bloggers who were saying the same thing. There was this whole movement of people who were saying our bodies are awesome just as they are and we could love ours! I wanted to feel the way they felt about their bodies so I challenged myself to my bikini challenge and started my blog. I was becoming part of the #bodypositivity movement and so it seemed was the rest of the world.

Adverts started popping up on TV proclaiming that all bodies were beautiful and everyone deserved to have their product. It wasn’t just for beautiful people - it could be for you too (red flag number one). More and more people on social media were saying that they were body positive accompanied by photos of themselves, fully filtered, showing them folded over so far that their head was almost kissing their own ass, just so they could prove that they had fat rolls. It was starting to feel like body positivity was the new thin and if you weren’t body positive then you were failing.

On the days, and months, when I wasn’t feeling great about myself, I would hate myself. I was supposed to have conquered the sad thoughts about my body. I was supposed to be positive about myself all the time and say fuck you to all the haters. Body positivity was now something I was failing at.

I wasn’t but that’s the problem with the phrase body positivity to me now. Those brands and people that hijacked the movement, changed the narrative and put the onus on the individual. YOU need to love your body. YOU need to love the skin you’re in. YOU need to love our product even though the largest model in our shoot is a size 12 and we don’t sell anything beyond a size 16 so you can love your body at any size as long as it’s a size we sell. And if you don’t, then you aren’t being positive and that’s bad.

I feel that if we really want everyone to feel to truly happy in their bodies then we need companies which promote diets, or diets disguised as lifestyles, to shut down. We need laws, policies and cultures that shame and discriminate against fat people, disabled people and/or anyone's body that goes against the western ideals of beauty to be radically changed or destroyed. We need to tackle the systems, not the individuals.

For me, the term body positive has become exclusive, attached to morals and doesn’t represent what I’m exploring anymore. I appreciate it as a movement and all the hard work that has been done (and is still being done) by people who truly believe in what it stands for but body positivity is not for me anymore.

Instead I am using phrases such as body curiosity/know yourself/body awareness as descriptors of where I am at. I think my body is incredible and I love discovering more about it and what it, and I, can do. I just don’t have to be positive about it all the time. I mean, I still can’t fold myself over so I can kiss my own ass.