Is ‘body-positive’ as simple as ‘love your body’?

Today I read another of those articles you come across by a sensitive young soul about learning to love your body. It was an admirable work. It must have taken quite a lot of courage to write it. The author had low self esteem because of her body as a youth, perhaps gone a bit overboard on trying to change it, developed depression along the way, been proscribed anti-depressants that made her fat, recovered and is now learning to change the way she thinks about her body rather than her body itself.

A part of me appreciates that such messages are important. But another part of me thinks this kind of polarisation of ‘change yourself’ and ‘love yourself’ is a false dichotomy and perhaps even a little dangerous.

It seems undeniable that an effective way to overcome insecurity is to improve whatever aspect of yourself you are insecure about. If you have a fear of public speaking then a reasonable response is to practice public speaking until you become good at it. At that point you will no longer be insecure about public speaking. You will have changed yourself into something that is easier for you to love.

Why does a similar attitude not apply to our bodies and our identities more generally? If I am insecure about my body because I am five kilos overweight then a straightforward response would seem to be to lose 5 kilos. The source of the insecurity is now gone. If I am insecure about my ability to converse with my intellectual friends I can go read some books. Now the source of the insecurity is gone. Changing your body and loving your body isn’t an either/or proposition.

There seem to be two critical issues here to me. The first is the manner in which you go about this transformation. If you go on a crash diet of raw carrots and start running several hours a day that’s quite a dramatic change and we might reasonable suspect some risks from such a transition. However, if your target weight is sensible and you lose weight through a patient process of tweaking your diet and gradually increasing the quantity and intensity of exercise as your fitness increases and old activities are no longer challenging you will lose weight without endangering your sanity or your physical health.  

The second issue is where you get your values from. High fashion magazines, among other things, are obviously toxic. Men's body building magazines are similarly implicated in mental health disorders. But a general desire to be healthy and an acknowledgement that most people in society are more attracted to healthy people is quite distinct from pretending that you're simply fat and there is nothing you can do about it, especially when you follow that up with claims that others are immoral for not seeing your beauty.

Developing a theoretical robust paradigm for judging what constitutes a healthy or safe source of body image values is obviously difficult. But having a common sense or intuitive paradigm doesn't seem all that complex. 

This greyer attitude to the body can be generalised in terms of making peace with what you can’t change and working in a self-respectful manner on the things you can. I can’t make myself taller, so I will make peace with that. But I can make myself more muscular, so I will work on that because more muscular is something I want to be. During the process of becoming more muscular I will accept my limitations in terms of time commitments, finances, willpower and other factors that will affect how fast I can become more muscular. I’ll get there, just like once upon a time I could barely do basic algebra and a little over 3 years later I can now solve Hamiltonian functions.

I don’t want to beleaguer this point, but it’s important. It is fundamental to your life satisfaction that you synthesise who you want to be with who you are. Accept your limitations, but reach for your potential. Try to learn to love the things you can’t change, but don’t accept the things you can change if you don’t like them, because then they will nag at you at make you miserable forever.