Over the course of our lifetimes, movements dedicated to diet culture have always been prevalent. From the Santa Monica diet, to the ketogenic diet, these terms are part of our vocabulary, something we see frequently on various newsstands and Instagram advertisements.
However, a particular movement has grown over the past decade that worked as a countermovement to diet culture: the body positivity movement. By definition, this movement is “the assertion that all people deserve to have a positive body image, regardless of how society and popular culture view ideal shape, size, and appearance. “While the movement made progress in ways of advertising a different range of bodies for clothing brands, has it succeeded in terminating the deeply ingrained stigma that plagued people who are not “acceptably-fat?”
We have all had an invisible, yet toxic relationship with fatphobia that we carried with us our entire lives. Fatphobia is defined as a pathological fear of fatness. We see it in books, movies and television shows where being bigger is a punchline to remind people of the downsides of not looking “acceptable” in a society where being thin is rewarded. It is something I personally experienced growing up, and the lasting damage of this constant reminder is frustrating.
It wasn’t until a few years ago that body positivity resurged in our society and made people feel more comfortable in their own skin. This is not the first time a movement like this has emerged. In the 1960s, there was a fat acceptance movement, founded by Black and queer women who wanted to raise awareness of the obstacles bigger women face every day. This movement, and similar ones, merged together to become the movement we have today, which is a more self-esteem based movement.
Whether the movement has been successful in changing the conversation depends on your definition of success.
It is successful in making people, especially women, more accepting of their bodies, mostly due to the rise of influencers who are reminding people that it is okay to look the way you do.
Models and singers, like Ashley Graham and Lizzo, are reminders that we can be beautiful and successful despite not conforming to the need to be skinny. However, just praising celebrities who look different doesn’t wipe away the smear of fatphobia.
We see countless clothing companies jump on the bandwagon of accepting our figures by including models who look bigger in their advertisements. But all of that promotion does nothing if there is no change to the sizing charts themselves. As we have seen over the past few months, performative activism doesn’t mean anything if there is no substance behind it.
Hiring plus-size models to make these companies look “inclusive,” yet not carrying the sizes that are supposed to cater to plus-size people is meaningless. Plus-size women make up 68% of consumers in fashion, yet very little is tailored to them. So, in essence, the body positivity movement hasn’t created substantial change yet.
Additionally, mainstream magazines still include headlines that state in bold letters different methods to look skinny. Celebrity magazines still circle women’s cellulite, which is entirely normal, by the way, and call them “fat”. And when Adele lost weight because she wanted to, people started to pay more attention to her appearance than her actual music, which is a testament to the fact that even though we say that we are body positive, we are not really acting like it.
So where do we go from here? Like most movements, we have to destroy the stigma that being plus-size is “unacceptable” by adapting clothing sizes to realistic bodies and having tough conversations about our involvement with maintaining this stigma in our psyche. By not feeling entitled to have an opinion on the way plus-size people look, and revolutionizing different industries from the top-down, we can make the body positivity movement successful.
But if we reduce our involvement in this movement to giving compliments to plus-size models on social media, we are not doing enough to ensure the movement’s success. If we remain where we are now, our society will still be fatphobic.
