Is it possible to always love your body? Wouldn't it be enough to accept to exist and make peace with yourself? This is the premise of a new movement.
When I was seventeen I suffered from an eating disorder. Looking back at my situation, it seems so stupid, absurd and surreal, but certain things are like a whirlwind, where you get sucked in without knowing how it happens.
I was a quiet, rather insecure teenager, perpetually worried about school results and in constant need of approval. In my head I wanted to be brilliant and successful, but in reality, I felt awfully clumsy and inadequate. In my head I wanted to be like the heroines of my favorite stories, strong, successful and above all beautiful, that meant physical perfection. In a distorted perception, being very thin was equivalent to being admired and therefore loved.
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And therefore, although I absolutely did not need it, I started a terrible diet, made up of skipped breakfasts, lots of coffee to fill the hunger holes, bread sticks for lunch and hours of exercise (as a premise, I hate sports, I re-evaluated them only recently). In every situation, during every hour of the day, my body was an obsession, the numbers on the scale perpetually imprinted in my mind, the centimeters of the skin scanned and judged all the time.
Fortunately, I managed to get out of this phase of my life, but the thing that I have observed and continue to observe with a certain amazement and a little sadness is how practically all the women and girls I meet are obsessed with the idea of a perfect physique or how they live a labored relationship with food, where even the slightest binge seems like a mortal sin.
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We could talk for hours about how, even today, mainstream media struggle to address the issues of Body Positivity in a coherent way, using the most superficial slogans to create an appearance of modernity but in fact going to celebrate the usual models and canons.
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Body Positivity was created as a wave of protest in the 1960s by "fat activists", tired of having to suffer discrimination and abuse caused by their weight. Right now, the movement is very popular but more superficial in nature, full of apparently empowering quotes, but in the end, celebrating absolutely "normal" bodies, that conform to an idea of a socially acceptable beauty.
In this way, those who do not have conventional beauty, those who belong to a minority, those with a disability, are pushed aside. Does it make sense to see another fitness influencer showing her "rolls" of fat on Instagram with the hashtag #bodypositivity?
I’m not saying that there are bodies more or less deserving to exist and to be celebrated, indeed it would be rather hypocritical of me, a thin, able-bodied, white girl.
But the fact remains that whatever our body is, it’s not easy to always love ourselves, even when we reach a certain degree of confidence, we still live in a world that influence us, in physics that can change unpredictably, in days where we just can't look at ourselves in the mirror. The body remains a fixation in our lives.
And this is where Body Neutrality comes in. This movement began to gain traction online around 2015 and was popularized by plus-size blogger Gabi Gregg; recently stars like Taylor Swift and Jameela Jamil have talked about it: at the base there is the belief that our happiness does not depend on our body, but that this is simply one of the aspects that make up our identity, to be looked at with a neutral eye.
The focus of personal value is no longer on physical beauty, we exist as people and the body is the instrument that "hosts" us, to be enhanced more for its abilities, for all the goals it allows us to achieve than for its appearance.
It doesn't matter if we don't love our body every day, but we love the fact that it supports and keeps us alive. We eat and exercise to feel good, not to appear. It doesn't matter how we look, who what we are. And perhaps, in its simplicity, this is a truly revolutionary message.
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