The Big Lie that Body Positivity Promotes Obesity
By: Shelbey Osborne – Confluence Daily is your daily news source for women in the know.
I am MAD.
I am so sick of hearing people say that body positive is promoting obesity.
This comment INFURIATES ME.
Honestly, I hate even using that word but I am doing it here to make a point. The “O” word is used in the medical industry for people who are over a certain BMI. As many of you know, and if you don’t know, google it, the BMI scale is hugely inaccurate and was never meant to be used in the way it is.
So since the word itself is inaccurate all it is doing is and creating fear in people and shaming them for being in this category of the BMI chart.
But besides all that… saying that body positive promotes “o” is coming from fatphobia.
We are afraid to let fat people love themselves because it means we are allowed to do the same. It means all of our attempts to be smaller and earn our worth with our body are meaningless.
I’ll say it again – There is no proven long-term way to lose weight, 99% of diets fail and 66% of people gain the weight back!
The diet and medical industry like to BLAME the individual for having “too large” of a body, even when they are giving us faulty products/services/advice to supposedly “fix” the problem.
This only puts extreme pressure on people to change their body and they continue the cycle of blaming themselves when they inevitably don’t lose the weight (and sometimes gain back more and wreak havoc on their metabolism).
Feeling like your body is wrong is trauma and comes with so many other concerns for people who have to deal with type of stigmatization.
When did guilt, shame, and blame ever help anything?
Stop fucking shaming people! Stop stigmatizing larger bodies! Stop acting like one size fits all! Stop belittling people! Stop spitting your fatphobic beliefs everywhere!!!
Our bodies are the vessels which we experience our life. Everyone deserves to live a life of happiness and freedom, regardless if you think they take care of their health well enough.
Shelbey Osborne is a Body Image Coach. She is passionate about helping women to ditch the diet obsession so they can gain back their power, freedom, and happiness by transforming the limiting beliefs they have about their body. Shelbey is a former health coach who now uses her background in nutrition and fitness to show women how to have a relationship with food and exercise that feels self-honouring instead of self-punishing. She is devoted to sharing the message of Health at Every Size and acknowledging our privileges to work towards collective healing and justice for all humans.
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