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A few months ago, after reading a Bon Appetit interview in which the writer and chef Julia Turshen discussed her commitment to breaking free from diet culture, I made a similar promise to myself. After a decade-plus of Weight Watchers and joyless elliptical cycles and under-seasoned chicken breasts and every other tool of internalized fatphobia that had taught me to see my fat body as a foe, I was ready to throw in the towel. By then I had spent the better part of my life battling binge eating disorder (B.E.D.). I’ve been underweight and overweight, in treatment and out of it, existentially miserable and then — finally — not.
Today, I’m proudly out as a lesbian — finally dating, sleeping with, and loving women after over two closeted decades — and I’m lucky enough to have work, friendships, and family that fulfill me. But my relationship to my body still feels like the third rail, the ultra-charged obstacle that keeps me from trying on the clothes I really want to wear, or attending a new exercise class without fear, or confidently disrobing in front of a new partner (no matter how into them I am). Now, I resolved, I was finally going to do my best to turn my body into a friend, or at least the kind of acquaintance I didn’t dread running into at the occasional party.
There are endless ideas out there about how people who struggle with eating disorders or body-image issues should “fix” themselves. Unfortunately, a lot of them feed directly into a diet-industrial complex that would rather have you pay $20 a month to Noom for the rest of your life than actually learn to feel comfortable in your own skin. Some, like the “body positivity” theory that emerged from the fat acceptance movement of the 1960s, contain real wisdom and have helped countless people; striving to believe all bodies are beautiful, worthy of love, care, and affection, is an inarguably noble project. Of course, this was not all that the original “body positive” movement stood for — a defanging that reflects how the ideology isn’t immune to being appropriated by a fatphobic, capitalist dominant culture.
As the writer Amanda Mull argued in a 2018 op-ed for Vox, while body positivity used to be “just one element of an ideology that included public anti-discrimination protests and anti-capitalist advocacy against the diet industry,” over time it “shed its radical, practical goals in favor of an advocacy that’s entirely aesthetic and a problem that can be wholly solved by those looking to sell you something.”
When I first heard the term “body neutrality,” though, I was intrigued, despite myself.
When it came to my stretch marks or my jeans size, “positivity” always felt like a stretch. “Neutrality”? That felt like something I could at least aspire to. But what is body neutrality, exactly? Is it a stop along the route to unfettered self-love, or a destination all on its own? Is it realism, or cynicism? Is it aspirational, or is it just a starting-out point?
Coined, by some accounts, through a 2015 workshop led by the counselor Anne Poirier, “body neutrality” began as a philosophy of embodiment that sought to shift focus away from how our bodies look and toward how they can make us feel good. For the author, activist, and weight-based discrimination expert Virgie Tovar, body neutrality is “one point on a spectrum of healthy body image” and “absolutely a win” within the context of a “culture that currently teaches people to hate their bodies.”
She elaborates, explaining her slight preference for the (original) politics of body love: “I came up in the political tradition of radical fat liberation. With its roots in anti-establishment queer politics, it has a contrarian aesthetic/ethic: the culture tells me to hate my body; well, guess what? I'm going to worship my flawless body. Suck it, patriarchy!”
As Tovar touches on, body neutrality doesn’t resonate with everyone. Writer Marisa Meltzer, who helped publicize the concept in a 2017 article for The Cut, has a somewhat more complicated view of the term these days. “I'm never going to feel neutral about my body or food or exercise or anything related to it,” she tells me via email. “It feels a little like the way that intuitive eating never worked for me,” she adds, referring to the eating philosophy that encourages practitioners to discern between physical and emotional hunger. “How am I supposed to step back and coolly assess something I have such a charged relationship to?”
Yoga teacher, writer, and activist Jessamyn Stanley has similar reservations. “Personally, I have always struggled with body neutrality, because I don't think that we can be neutral toward our bodies. Part of the reason for living is to actually have these really hard experiences, some of which involve our physical bodies,” Stanley explains. "For me, today, I definitely don't feel neutrally toward my body. I feel like my body is political and full of complications. Since I got here, on this earth, it has been a rollercoaster ride, and I'm really at the stage of enjoying that experience.”
Personally, all I want is to be down for the rollercoaster ride — to fully experience every dip and curve of my consciousness and my self-understanding — because they mean I’m alive. While I don’t think I’m there quite yet, body neutrality feels like an important step along the way; I hope I can make my way toward the philosophy of “body love” that Tovar espouses someday, but you have to start somewhere, right?
Even if “I’m neutral about my body!” doesn’t seem like something to shout from the rooftops, that’s actually kind of the point: Body neutrality meets me where I am. It doesn’t ask me to love myself, or buy anything, or sell anything, or double down on sunrise hikes or feel-good mantras. What it does ask me to do, though, is make a commitment to beginning the internal work of truly and honestly posing myself the question, “How do I feel about myself today?”, with the full understanding that the answer isn’t static.
Some days, I leap out of bed feeling fantastic, ready to put on that cute Wray dress and hit the town. Other days, I don’t get out of bed at all, too worried about what the scale or the reflection of my frame in the mirror will tell me. To me, body neutrality is about learning to live most of my life in between those two extremes, about teaching myself to proceed with self-compassion when my disordered eating and body dysmorphia make it impossible for me to feel “positive,” or confident, or anything remotely good about the way I look. It’s not easy — actually, it’s the hardest practice I’ve ever committed to, harder than any diet plan or exercise regimen I’ve ever tried — but for me, it’s worth it.
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