What Is Body Neutrality?
If you struggle with your body image, you may find it difficult to love and appreciate your body. Our culture often conveys critical messages towards bodies in the form of fatphobia, ageism, and pretty privilege that can be internalized into painful internal beliefs about yourself.
Body neutrality offers an accessible approach to treating your body with more kindness. Instead of feeling frustrated by pursuing the lofty goal of always loving how you look, body neutrality is an approach that’s focused on making peace with your body. Body neutrality can involve viewing your body from a place of appreciation for what it can do, while resisting the impulse to criticize it for what it can’t do.
Body Positivity vs. Body Acceptance vs. Body Neutrality
Body Positivity
Body positivity is a social movement that advocates for the acceptance of all bodies, regardless of size, shape, physical abilities, or any other physical trait. This approach focuses on how all bodies have worth and that everyone deserves to feel good about their body.
Body positivity has brought much-needed attention to the need to end harmful stigmas and embrace body diversity. Yet the approach has limitations in that individually, people may find it challenging to successfully put body positivity into practice towards themselves.
Body Acceptance
Body acceptance essentially means treating your body with respect, and dropping any struggle you might have towards your body. Instead of trying to change your body to fit society’s norms, body acceptance involves observing your body as it is today, and working to support and care for it without harsh attempts to modify or change it to conform to expectations you may have for it.
Body Neutrality
Body neutrality is an approach focused on treating your body as neutral, meaning neither good nor bad. This approach helps you to step outside of an endless internal debate over whether your body looks good or not, and instead allows you to treat your body as simply a part of you that is your responsibility to take care of and live with.
Body neutrality can be a useful tool in riding the waves of change all bodies go through in some form or another, such as through aging, pregnancy, weight gain or loss, and menopause. Body neutrality allows you to view these body changes as neither good nor bad, but simply a part of the cycle of life.
Why Body Neutrality Feels More Achievable
At times you may find body positivity and body acceptance useful, so this article is not about ditching those approaches if they work for you. But you may find body neutrality to be a more achievable approach towards overcoming body image struggles.
People who struggle with body image have often spent years (if not a whole lifetime) critiquing their body and feeling stigmatized by harmful societal messages about what constitutes a “good” body. Body neutrality offers a manageable step away from believing every negative message that you might hear in your mind or from other people about your body. With body neutrality you can learn to care for and respect your body even on days you can’t muster positive feelings towards it.
Why Fighting Your Body Often Backfires
If you have poor body image, you probably have tried ways to change your body in order to feel better about it. You may find yourself locked into a cycle of critiquing an aspect of your body, attempting to change it, and then succeeding or failing at making the change. Whether or not you succeed at changing your body, this approach can backfire and trap you into a self-defeating cycle.
Take restrictive dieting for example. You may successfully lose weight while on a restrictive diet plan, but in doing so, you are reinforcing internal beliefs about how the only way to accept yourself is at a lower weight. This leaves you potentially stuck in a constant state of worrying about regaining the weight, or continually moving the goal post of what your “ideal” weight should be.
Or, like many people, you may struggle to lose weight, and find yourself perpetually monitoring your body and feeling like you’re not measuring up to a standard that you feel you need to reach. Either way, you’ve reinforced an idea that the only way to feel relief from body criticisms is to lose weight. Over time, this can develop into a feeling of shame about how you look that can be painful to navigate and difficult to overcome.
Living According to Your Values Instead of Your Appearance
Body neutrality is a tool that allows you to step outside of the internal battle of whether to love or hate your body. When you let go of this, a space opens up where you have more mental energy to focus on what matters to you. When you treat your body with neutrality, you can focus on what you want to do with your body, rather than how your body looks or functions.
Maybe you want to try a dance class, but have always worried that you didn’t have the right body type for it. Or maybe you would like to date but are worried about not measuring up to your ideas of having the type of body that is “dateable”. Body neutrality allows you to focus on moving towards the values you hold, rather than waiting for life to start at some far off point in the future when you finally “fix” your body enough.
How Therapy Can Help
Therapy for body image struggles can give you the support and guidance to move past body criticisms and towards greater body acceptance and neutrality. Therapy offers a space where you can build more kindness towards yourself and your body, and find more freedom around food, movement, and self-expression.
It’s not your fault that we live in a society filled with stigmas, and it’s not all on you to never be affected by these stigmas. But therapy with a body affirming practitioner can help you recognize when these internalized stigmas are arising, validate the pain they have caused, and determine your own valued direction forward in spite of these stigmas.
If you’re in Texas, I’m a licensed professional counselor specializing in helping you to grow kindness and acceptance towards your body so that you can live your life more fully. I offer virtual sessions for people throughout Texas, and in-person sessions in my Houston office. If you’re interested in working with me, schedule a free consultation call at the link below.