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Tag: Body Diversity

Subvert The ‘Body Hierarchy’

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My body is not better than or less than your body — or any body.

But is it? As I type this statement I’m spammed. A text notification pops up on my computer screen reading: “Tanya, 1 cup at 8pm shrinks your belly while u sleep, this is why Shark-Tank judges back it! Learn more.”

I question my supposed worthiness as 51-year-old, postmenopausal woman. My rounded belly is judged as a “flaw,” and by purchasing this quick-fix product, I’m promised flat, “attractive” abs, at least defined by perfectionist cultural standards of health and beauty. Sigh.

We’re barraged day after day by these oppressive messages that certain bodies are more valuable than other bodies.

These messages are based on body hierarchy, a system that ranks our place on its ladder depending on our unique human characteristics. Some we’re born with; others change as we live. The list includes body size, gender, race, class, age, ability and health status. Body hierarchy is built on the belief that there’s a “right” and “wrong” way to have a body, such as: Thin bodies are better than fat bodies. Young bodies are better than old bodies. Abled bodies are better than disabled bodies.

The root of the cause

So the solution to poor body image isn’t to fix our bodies or even to just try harder to love what we see in the mirror, making our body the problem. It’s to dismantle what’s driving it, the root cause, this system that ranks some bodies as better than others.

When we embrace body diversity the system will crash and body image will be a challenge of the past. Ultimately, by celebrating the uniqueness of each human body we can create a kind, just, compassionate world for every body.

On a recent podcast episode of “Unlocking Us,” shame researcher Brene Brown highlights the potential power we over this body hierarchy. She had read an article revealing that “if every woman woke up and said, ‘I love what I see, I’m not buying anything,’ would be a faster collapse [of the economy] than the airlines after 9⁄11. It would be within 24 hours, the entire system.”

Yes: Collectively, we are that powerful.

Embracing body diversity

“Human bodily diversity is a form of natural intelligence,” Sonya Renee Taylor, activist and author of “The Body Is Not an Apology,” says on Brown’s podcast. “It means that all bodies are supposed to be different because that is the version that is specific to your particular journey.

“In order to have a thriving world,” she says, “a thriving ecosystem that works in harmony, we need variance. We recognize that. We know that innately. And yet because we are so far away from our own sense of inherent knowing of our enoughness, we’ve constructed a world where that’s not true for our bodies.”

So, let’s take action.

“‘Check your privilege,’” body image coach Summer Innanen says on her podcast, “Fearless Rebelle Radio,” “means that you bring attention to your words and actions to make sure you’re not harming others who actually experience discrimination, and that you’re using privilege to be an ally to eradicate fat phobia.”

For example, while exploring the body-positive movement I learned that I have “thin privilege” — the advantages that are associated with someone who lives in a body deemed “acceptable” by society and that exist only because of weight stigma, discrimination or stereotyping.

“As a thin or in-between-size person,” Innanen says, “this is not to say that you can’t have a messed-up body image or that you don’t struggle emotionally. Rather, it’s about acknowledging that your experience is not the same as someone who actually lives in a larger body.”

So if we are calling ourselves “fat,” when we are not, we must stop.

Thin or in-between-size people, unlike those living in larger bodies, aren’t bullied or judged by others for simply enjoying a slice of pizza or an ice cream cone. Shopping for clothes in their size is no big deal. And a visit to the doctor’s office isn’t filled with the dread of potentially being judged purely by your body weight.

Or perhaps you do love your body. But “if you only love your body when you love how you look, that’s not love,” says Lexie Kite, co-founder of Beauty Redefined, a nonprofit whose mantra is “Women are more than just bodies. See more. Be more.” She continues, “That is conditional and objectifying. You deserve love.”

Ultimately we must recognize there’s a huge difference between disliking our bodies and being attacked by society for our body size.

Examine your body talk

Because of body insecurities we may shame ourselves for simply eating dessert or having a round belly. While our intention isn’t to harm other bodies, acknowledge these comments as fat phobic.

Furthermore, recognize fat shaming as placing blame and making assumptions about people’s behaviors based solely on their body size, without acknowledging the complex factors that affect our health.

And let’s stop comparing our bodies with other bodies, as comparisons hold up this oppressive system.

Consume body-positive media

The average American woman is between size 16 and 18, according to a 2016 study by the International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education.

Yet the majority of the images we see don’t represent reality.

We can intentionally choose to consume media that are countercultural, portraying realistic bodies, and to unfollow and block media that make us feel-less than or better-than other bodies.

On Facebook and Instagram we have the power to hide ads or report ads and include a reason. “It’s offensive” is my personal favorite.

And to take a stand against spam texts and emails selling magical belly-shrinking potions, add filters to your phone and computer.

Remember: No body is born inherently better than another body. Body image wouldn’t exist without body hierarchy.

Let’s collapse the system and create a kind, compassionate, just world for every body.
Be a rebel.

(Originally published in my column, Radical Acceptance, Jackson Hole News and Guide, October 14, 2020)

The Before and After of Hating Your Body

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Taryn Brumfitt posted a before-and-after photo of herself on Facebook.

But with a twist.

Instead of the conventional “before” photo, where you’re sad and miserable and your body is viewed as “undesirable,” Brumfitt first posted her body-building competition photo, posing in a silver bikini and high heels.

Next she posted a photo of her natural woman’s body — relaxed, smiling, sitting sideways on a stool, nude — her body the shape it settled to when she was no longer trying to control it.

The after photo was her “liberated” body, when she let go of unrealistic body ideals, the belief that her appearance equaled her self-worth and that well-being has a certain look.

Yet it took some time to have the courage to post a photo like that.

It started with her in tears slumped on her bathroom floor in despair. She felt exhausted, resentful, and hated her body after having her third child.

Stressed over “getting her body back” and feeling judged for “letting herself go,” Brumfitt set out to fix her “broken” body.

At first she considered cosmetic surgery. But she worried about the message that choice would send to her daughter and turned to fitness instead. She signed up for a body-building competition, and after months of intense training and restrictive eating she attained what culture considers the “perfect” body.

“I would go to the beach with my children to eat fish and chips, and I would pull out my Tupperware container of boiled chicken and vegetables — not much fun for a lover of food like me,” Brumfitt said in a Greatist.com article.

The “picture of health” on the outside, Brumfitt felt miserable inside. The amount of sacrifice, time and obsession wasn’t worth it. She realized that if she had to restrict, overexercise and punish herself to maintain that body type, her body wasn’t meant to be at that weight.

After listening to her competitors’ fears about gaining weight after the competition, Brumfitt was ready to take the stand for healthy body image that changed the course of her life.

The Facebook photos went viral, receiving 3.6 million clicks overnight, and she received over 7,000 emails from people all over the world sharing their stories of eating disorders and body image challenges.

Seeing she had the power to create a greater impact on our global body-hating epidemic, Brumfitt founded the Body Image Movement and produced “Embrace,” a social-change documentary film examining body image struggles.

You too can embrace

Maybe you’re one of the 91% of women dissatisfied with her body, seeking that elusive perfect “after” photo, beating yourself up over what you see in the mirror and every morsel of food you eat.

Culturally we’ve been conditioned to believe we can love our bodies only when they’re in “perfect” condition.

But “bodies aren’t meant to stay the same,” says body positive social media influencer Megan Jane Crabbe on Instagram.

“Bodies are supposed to grow and change and carry the signs of our life on them,” Crabbe said.

It’s normal for a body to change through the natural stages of life: puberty, childbirth, menopause, (or “manopause” for the gentlemen) and a multitude of other reasons, including illness and injury.

“How can the signs of having lived be anything other than beautiful?” Crabbe said. “Our changing, growing, aging bodies are extraordinary, and we deserve to inhabit them without shame.”

Self-love, not body hate

You’re not going to just wake up one morning and love your body.

“It’s like a muscle that grows and it grows over time,” Brumfitt said in a BusinessChicks.com article, “and it’s something you’ve got to give a lot of love and a lot of energy to, but it’s so worth it.

“When it comes to health,” she said, “you can’t look after something that you don’t love.”

Self-care not self-control

Embracing your body doesn’t mean you don’t care for your body. It’s not “letting yourself go.” It’s not promoting “obesity” or “mediocrity” in your health.

It advocates self-care, not self-control. But how do you tell the difference?

Are your behaviors driven by the feeling you “need” to or “should” control your body? Are they creating stress? Do your actions feel punitive?

Or do your behaviors feel nourishing, building, relaxing — true self-care?

What foods feel nourishing to you right now? Sometimes enjoying a slice of cake with your best friend nourishes you beyond the ingredients. What kind of movement feels good to you today? Maybe rest is more nourishing.

Self-care is subjective. It’s about what feels right and good for you, now.

For Brumfitt, some days self-care is yoga. Some days it’s deadlifting 240 pounds. Some days it’s playing with her kids at the beach, running marathons, writing or hiking.

See the difference?

Be part of the revolution

The Body Image Movement is a judgment-free zone.

The movement instead stands for: celebrating our bodies for all that they can do, have done and will do; body diversity in the media and advertising; acknowledging that aging is a privilege; and health at every size.

It’s not profit before people, excessive Photoshopping in the media, the notion that weight determines your health, the objectification of women.

You have a choice about how you spend your life. You can live at war with your body or you can embrace it.

As Crabbe said in a recent Instagram post:

“I have given up on my body.

“I’ve given up on my body becoming something that it was never supposed to be.

“I’ve given up on my body being a measure of my value as a human being.

“I’ve given up on my body being the reason why I don’t deserve happiness because I’ve always deserved it.

“And I’ve finally let myself go into the world without believing that fitting into a bulls–t cultural standard of beauty is all I have to offer.”

Here’s to letting ourselves go. I hope it feels damn good.

You can be caged or liberated. In 2015 I chose liberated, and I assure you, it feels damn good.

Size or shape doesn’t define your health

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Your body is not a billboard for your health. Your body is your home.” — Amy Pershing, founder of Bodywise

When we look at our health and bodies from this perspective, we can make room for self-compassion, tolerance and patience. Yet American culture focuses the lens on our physical appearance, convincing us that our health is defined by our size or shape. This is a distorted idea of health.

We need to zoom out. We need to widen the lens and look deeper into an evolved definition of health. We can’t assume someone’s health status, abilities or goals based on the size or shape of her body.

“Fit bodies don’t necessarily tell the story of a healthy person, nor do (larger) bodies tell the story of a lazy person,” wrote Erin Brown, an author for Girls Gone Strong, a body-positive health-and-fitness website focused on female empowerment. “You can’t know everything about a person’s behavior or life by simply looking at her body.”

No ideal shape or size

Healthism — a preoccupation with health as a primary achievement of well-being, as first defined by political economist Robert Crawford — emphasizes personal responsibility while ignoring important social determinants of health. In a world steeped in dieting culture and healthism, it can be assumed that many people have already been trying to change their eating habits (maybe for years), and their inability to sustain such changes has resulted in feelings of shame and self-doubt.

Thus, trying to maintain or attain a body that culture portrays as healthy may take us further away from health.

The truth: We’re not all meant to be some “ideal” size or shape. If we all ate exactly the same way and had identical exercise regiments we would still look vastly different from one another.

Body diversity is part of what makes us human.

“The body is our home, our temple. Just as everyone’s literal home looks different so does everyone’s body and that is something to be celebrated and respected. If we can cultivate inner peace and a feeling of home within, then we can take that with us everywhere rather than looking to external sources to feel comfortable, welcome and at home.”
– Ariel Mann, Yoga Instructor

Widen the lens, redefine health

What does an evolved definition of health look like?

Health is mental, physical, emotional and spiritual well-being. It’s about nourishing your whole self, looking through a wider lens from a whole human being perspective, not just your physical body. It encourages us to honor our deepest self and empowers us to see our truth. Health exists on a continuum that varies with time and circumstance for each individual.

And one thing that health doesn’t define: your self-worth.

Factors that affect our health include: genetics, environment, life experiences, access to health care, socioeconomic status, culture, trauma, illness, age, community, education, social support, sleep, spirituality, stress level, stigma, self-esteem, safety, self-care routine, employment and job security, physical activity, mental health, relationship with food, body and self, individual thoughts, feelings, beliefs, happiness, relationships, connection, sense of purpose … you see where I’m going here.

So how can we honor true health?

One way is to speak our authentic truth, to tell our stories and to express our experiences as a human being. We often struggle to speak openly about what we are really experiencing in our lives and what’s really affecting our health. When we focus on weight, thinking we need to change the size and shape of our body, our lens focuses on food and exercise — a very narrow view.

When we widen the lens we see all the things that impact health.

Perhaps you’ve been through a divorce. Maybe you’ve experienced an illness, injury, death in the family or a traumatic life experience. Yet somehow your body is the problem? We need to reinforce the complexity of the human experience instead of reinforcing health as the pinnacle of success and happiness.

Last month I read an article in The New York Times, “Why Your Cardiologist Should Ask Your About Your Love Life,” in which cardiologist Sandeep Jauhar describes research suggesting diet and exercise alone are not enough to roll back heart disease.

“It is increasingly clear that our hearts are sensitive to our emotional system — to the metaphorical heart, if you will. Doctors like myself are trained to think of the heart as a machine that we can manipulate with the tools of modern medicine,” Jauhar wrote. “Those manipulations, however, must be accompanied by greater attention to the emotional life that the heart, for so many years, was believed to contain.”

But what are we told by experts to do when our health is poor? Exercise more. Eat better.

While certainly these can be healthy strategies, we need to look at our health from a whole human being perspective. It’s time for a paradigm shift for health. Let’s widen the focus of the lens and see ourselves as more than our physical bodies.

You can decide what health means to you. Redefine health. Your size and shape doesn’t define your health.

(This article was published in the October 31, 2018 Jackson Hole News and Guide).

We can stop apologizing for our bodies now

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Repeat after me: “The body is not an apology.”

This mantra, coined by world-renowned activist, poet and author Sonya Renee Taylor, challenges us to shift away from shame for living in a perfectly imperfect human body.

Instead of viewing our bodies as problems that need to be fixed, we can heal from generations of body shame created by cultural messaging based on assumptions about health and perfectionist body ideals.

We can dismantle body shame by understanding its origins and the myths that cultivate it, by learning to separate wellness from weight and celebrating body diversity as part of the human experience.

‘Crappy inheritance’

First, we need to remember that we weren’t born feeling ashamed of our bodies. We learned it.

A study in the International Journal of Eating Disorders found 50% of girls internalized the thin ideal by the age of 5. In my practice clients can easily pinpoint when they began to feel shame for the bodies, and, yes, it’s predominantly during childhood.

Body shame is a “fantastically crappy inheritance,” Taylor said. We continue to pass it down generation after generation, but we aren’t obligated to keep it.

We’ve been programmed to believe a culturally created idea that we should attain this “perfect” body type, at any cost, if we want to be viewed as healthy and attractive. It puts us at war with ourselves, according to “Body Respect: What Conventional Health Books Leave Out, Get Wrong and Just Plain Fail to Understand About Weight,” by Linda Bacon and Lucy Aphramor.

“Our culture perpetuates the anti-fat myths that keep people depressed and at war with their own bodies: a war where little battles might be won in the short term with a diet, but then lost overall because those who turn to dieting can rarely maintain long term the look that is accepted as norm — one that is not necessarily the best weight for them and they feel worse about themselves for their failure,” the book states.

When we understand that health comes in a variety of sizes and shapes, we can dismantle the myth that thin equals healthy. Health improvements, such as changing diet and exercise habits, are beneficial independent of weight loss.

In addition, weight and BMI — body mass index — are poor predictors of disease and longevity.

Millions of people became “overweight” overnight when in 1997 a panel of nine medical experts chosen by the National Institutes of Health voted to lower the BMI cutoff from 27 to 25 in order to stay in line with the World Health Organization Criteria. They argued that a “round” number like 25 would be easy to remember, according to Harriet Brown, author of “Body of Truth: How Science, History and Culture Drive Our Obsession With Weight and What We Can Do About It.”

Furthermore, the bulk of epidemiological evidence suggests that five pounds “underweight” is more dangerous than 75 pounds “overweight,” according to the Health at Every Size Fact Sheet.

We need to remember the reason we see so much weight-loss messaging: It’s big business. BusinessWire reports it an industry worth a stunning $72 billion in 2019.

Changing your future, today

I challenge our community to see weight and health differently, whether for our own mental, physical health and emotional health, or for our children or patients.

Instead of basing your health “success” on the number on the scale, create exercise goals based on improved strength, balance, agility and cardiovascular gains. Skip the restrictive 30-day eating plan and practice improving your nutrition without strict “no’s,” as there’s a place for all foods on your plate. And, of course, wellness is not just physical health. How are you caring for your mental and emotional health?

Finally, we need to see and accept body diversity and body changes as part of the human experience. Imagine a world without body judgment, a world in which we no longer had to apologize for our bodies. How would you live differently?

Here’s what Jacksonites had to say:

• “I would enjoy my glass of wine and chocolate guilt-free and not stress over trying to get back my six-pack abs.”

• “I would have breastfed in public instead of hiding myself in my house for days on end, going crazy with boredom.”

• “I would wear a bikini and try a sport I’ve always wanted to try: surfing.”

• “I wouldn’t hate my body and think of normalcies such as stretch marks and cellulite as hideous and disgusting.”

• “That little number on the inside of my clothes wouldn’t be a trigger for disordered eating.”

• “Doctors wouldn’t be worried about my body not returning to ‘normal’ after pregnancy.”

• “My growing sixth grader wouldn’t look in the mirror and say she’s fat and needs to lose weight.”

• “When I get dressed, I would no longer feel like I had to strategically hide body parts.”

• “There would be attractive outdoor clothes that fit me, whatever my size.”

• “My daughter would look at my ‘mom belly’ with its loose skin and stretch marks with wonder and respect for its ability to create a baby.”

• “I would stop obsessing over the 5 to 10 pounds that I am constantly gaining and losing and realize that it’s where my body naturally wants to be, just part of living my life, enjoying a scoop of ice cream with my kids, going for brunch with my girlfriends.”

• “I would finally feel relaxed, at peace, accepted and attractive, just as I am. I would feel liberated.”

There is no wrong way to have a body. Repeat after me: “The body is not an apology.”