Tw Diet Culture - Blog Posts

Whenever someone tries to say something about how the body positivity movement is all about telling people being fat is a healthy lifestyle, I tell them about how I, at the ripe old age of 9 years old, wanted an eating disorder because I knew it could cause irreparable damage to your body so that you would have problems gaining weight even if you managed to recover. That’s right, I would rather having a potentially fatal mental and physical illness than live my life with the baby fat that I naturally had.

My first memory of hating my body was when I was either 4 or 5 and my mom got me one of those cute little kid bikinis for the Fourth of July with little Stars and Stripes all over it so that I could have fun in the blow-up pool in our backyard. However, looking at myself in the Disney princess vanity mirror, I wanted to cry. And even though I was so young and obviously I wasn’t going to look like a skinny model, I still immediately panicked and changed into a one-piece before hiding that kid bikini in the bottom of my drawer.

Today I am a mid-size young woman that still sometimes goes into a depression about my body, but I know that in the big picture, I have recovered greatly from those years of looking at myself in the mirror and telling myself that no one would ever love me (though sometimes that particular thought worms it’s way into my brain).

That is what the body positivity movement is. A way to tell little kids that hey, looking different than the starving models on the runways and in movies isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, even just having bigger girls on the screen and not as jokes or awful caricatures would have made me feel so much better about myself.

What is this shit? ‘Correct cellulite’, ‘a body positivity spa’? I don’t think so. It’s fine if this is the kind of stuff you enjoy doing, y’know if it makes you feel good about yourself, that’s wonderful. But when you show a model that’s ribs are showing(who is very beautiful but I’m proving a point) and pressure you by saying stuff like ‘get started on your bikini bod’. That’s not body positivity, but instead spreading body negativity. I can wear a bikini with my stomach rolls and rock it! So any girls that see stuff like this and feel bad about yourself, just know its BS!