Can You Be Body Positive and Still Want to Lose Weight?

Oct 5

{Nov 29, 2019 – Ed note: Since writing this post, my views on body positivity and weight have continued to evolve. Read: Why I No Longer Help People Lose Weight, Body Positivity Doesn’t End with Feeling Positive About Your Body, and Of Course It’s OK to Want to Lose Weight}

Aside from my private practice, I have been working part-time at a clinic that specializes in weight management for nearly four years. So, in the past few months, I had been narrowing the scope of my practice to focus on weight management (and sports nutrition, another interest of mine.)

I’ve been listening to more podcasts lately, and I stumbled across one by dietitian Christy Harrison called Food Psych. In it, she interviews women from all different walks of life about how they’ve changed their relationship with food and their bodies.

I’m admittedly only a couple episodes in, but this podcast got me thinking – as someone who is against dieting and believes in the idea of intuitive eating and focusing on health as opposed to the number on the scale, by focusing my practice on weight management, am I actually doing more harm than good? Despite approaching it from a place of promoting self-love and worthiness, and encouraging my clients to focus on the behaviours and not the outcome, am I still just adding to the narrative that we need to strive for a certain body type or appearance? That we have more control over our weight than we think?

“By helping people lose weight, am I adding to the narrative that we need to strive for a thin body?”

Dietitians’ Perspectives

When I was first exploring this question of whether it’s possible to be body positive and still want to lose weight, I asked some of my fellow dietitians what they thought. Most of them said that it was – one dietitian said, “Definitely. You can love your body and still want to improve it!” Which in a way makes sense – I’m sure most of us can think of something that we love that we want to make better: our career, our friendships, our partners… 😉 And I agreed when she added, “I believe self love and body positivity can actually HELP a person to lose weight. Self hate/negativity sure doesn’t work!”

Still, this answer didn’t satisfy me – after all, is weight loss an improvement?

Another dietitian said,

“I believe you can. For instance, someone might feel totally happy in their skin, but want to lose weight because they feel their weight is somehow negatively affecting their life (i.e. tired after walking up a flight of stairs, feeling uncomfortable in certain clothes, unable to do certain physical activities that they wish they could do, etc). Or someone who has a strong family history of diabetes, for instance, might feel comfortable in their body yet know that perhaps losing weight could reduce the chance of them developing diabetes as well.”

This answer didn’t really satisfy me either. All of those things – walking up a flight of stairs, feeling uncomfortable in certain clothes, unable to do certain physical activities, lowering diabetes risk, can all essentially be addressed without losing weight.

“Many ‘weight-related’ problems can be addressed without losing weight. #bodypositive”

While I agreed with many of my colleagues that self-love is a huge component of body positivity, and there’s no question that you can lose weight while being body positive, I was stuck on the idea that body positivity also includes “accepting your body as it is” – if you have a desire to lose weight, doesn’t that mean you want to change your body, and therefore are not being body positive?

What is Body Positivity, Anyway?

To further my exploration, I decided to try to figure out what body positivity actually means. I was led down a rabbit hole of sorts, but here are some definitions that resonated with me most:

{Click on the quoted person’s name to view the full article}

“To me, body positivity means accepting the body you have as well as the changes in shape, size, and ability it may undergo due to nature, age, or your own personal choices throughout your lifetime. It’s the understanding that your worth and what’s going on with you physically are two separate entities — that no matter what’s happening inside, outside, or to your body, you’re still just as worthwhile as the person next to you.”

—Mallorie Dunn, founder of SmartGlamour

“Body positivity encourages people to be OK with how they look and feel today. It shouldn’t encourage people to wish for or think about some undefined time in the future when their bodies will be different.”

—Jessamyn Stanley, yoga teacher

“After working for years with people at every point on the weight spectrum, it became obvious to me that we can’t choose some arbitrary number on the scale and turn our lives upside down to achieve it. This is what we call an eating disorder in a thin or average-weight person. We can’t then turn around and prescribe it to a fat person.

There is probably some range that is your genetic heritage, a range where your body “settles.” […] How do you find it if you can’t trust the charts? It is the weight your body settles and defends when you are not compulsive about dieting, exercising, and eating. You can’t get away from the truth about how you are living your day-to-day life. You can’t live in an unhealthy way and achieve a ‘healthy’ weight.”

—Deb Burgard, BodyPositive.com

“[B]ody positivity should mean you don’t always have to feel positively about your body, but you have the right to do so and that you also have the right to exist in your body and have whatever feelings about it without a constant stream of external imagery and rhetoric telling you that you should feel otherwise.”

—Ariel Woodson, co-producer of Bad Fat Broads

“To be body positive, it is important to assume responsibility for figuring out what your body needs. In many ways, this feels harder than having an external “expert” voice tell you what to eat and how to move. […] Be willing to trust your ability to know what feels good for your unique body. Learn from trial and error, and be kind to yourself when you make mistakes.

Another approach to being body positive is to examine the messages you’ve received — and continue to receive — throughout your life about health, weight, food, and exercise. You’ll want to pay attention not only to what you’ve been told by the media and medical professionals, but also by your family, friends, and culture. Once you clearly identify the messages, you can begin to think critically about which ones work for you. If particular information is intriguing, try it out to see how it makes you feel. If you adopt a behavior that leads to better physical and/or mental health, and — most importantly — it is something you can sustain over the long term, keep it in your toolkit. From this same observant position, you can also identify the messages that trigger guilt or shame. If the information doesn’t make you feel better or it is a behavior you can’t maintain over time, discard it and return to what you know to be right for you.”

—Connie Sobczak, co-founder of thebodypositive.org

It’s All in the “Why”

I will admit that going into the research for this post, I was leaning towards the idea that body positivity and desire to lose weight were mutually exclusive. As I combed through the various definitions, particularly the last two quotes, I’m left feeling a little more ambiguous again.

I mean, who am I to tell someone that they are not being body positive if they want to lose weight? To me, body positivity needs to include self-love, body acceptance and body autonomy for everyone.

I think the answer to whether it’s possible to be body positive and still want to lose weight lies in the “why”. Ask yourself: Why do I want to lose weight? Is it to have more mobility? To be healthier? To feel more comfortable in my clothes or my own skin? (And, if the answer is “to get to a certain number on the scale”, dig a little deeper – why does the number matter?)

Now, turn the question on its head – do I need to lose weight in order to achieve [insert your reason for wanting to lose weight here]?

I think why the argument for the “no” side is so strong for me is because chances are, you don’t – you may be able to achieve your goal without losing weight at all. Perhaps weight loss is one of many possible solutions to your core concern, but given that weight loss is statistically improbable, can we really say weight loss is “possible”?

How This Will Change My Practice

To be honest, I think many people land in my little corner of the web because they are looking to manage their weight. I think I need to be more curious when it comes to talking about people’s desire to lose/manage their weight, instead of just taking it at face value, and challenge myself to get comfortable with the uncomfortable conversation that is telling someone that perhaps weight loss is not the answer.

“Get comfortable with the uncomfortable conversation that #weightloss is not the answer. #BodyPositive”

What do you think? Is it possible to be body positive and still want to lose weight? How do you define “body positive”? Is it bad to not be body positive? I’d love to know your thoughts.

PS: I realized after I finished this post that Rebecca Scritchfield and Leslie Schilling, two weight-neutral, body-positive dietitians based in the US, did a Facebook Live in response to my question. The whole video has a lot of little nuggets, but if you’re pressed for time, they get to answering the question at 10:37. (And now I feel like I need to rewrite my whole post again ?)