Something I’m asked a lot is whether I think things are getting better when it comes to our bodies – how we feel in them and how society treats them. I always answer in the same way: some things are better, some things are worse and nearly everything is different to how it was.
The last decade has given us more body positive triumphs than ever before, with diet culture seemingly always ready to come back swinging in each round. One year detox teas reign supreme, the next we receive Lizzo as our queen. Some days, it really does feel like we’re locked in the final superhero battle – body liberation on one side, body shame the other – and I’m not sure which way it’s going to go yet.
But I do know one thing for sure: the way we talk about bodies today could not have existed in 2010’s wildest dreams. Back then, we still had the distinctly cardboard taste of the Special K diet in our mouths, the Kardashians were only just becoming household names, and beyond a few Dove adverts the conversation around media representation was pretty quiet. Fast-forward a decade and even my 89-year-old nan almost understands what I talk about for a living.
My own body shift happened right in the middle line of the decade. I spent the first five years entrenched in body hatred, desperate to shrink myself by any means necessary. I dieted, I detoxed, I popped pills and racked up treadmill hours. I hit the ultimate goal weight as 2015 rolled round and after one ‘Wait, why do I still hate myself ?’ epiphany, I finally realised that happiness wasn’t hiding in my bathroom scales.
The second half of the decade was spent immersing myself in the world of body positivity, working to heal the body image issues I’d carried around since childhood and slowly deciding to share what I’d learned with the world. I blogged, I posted, I spoke up, I got things wrong and tried to do better, I wrote a book and I gradually became Bodyposipanda.
Since the bulk of body conversation in recent years has happened online, I’ve had a front row seat. I’ve watched countless people wake up to the fact that diets don’t work. I’ve seen fatphobia being discussed on stages bigger than the original fat activists of the 1960s would’ve believed. I’ve witnessed brands start to represent a more diverse range of bodies than ever before – or risk the wrath of the internet.
I’ve also heard first-hand how our body struggles are morphing into new, equally unattainable shapes. Social media – for all its positive parts – has raised the stakes of bodily perfection to new levels. Between filters and Photoshop and an endless influx of Instagram models, we really are more appearance-focused than ever. In 2010, some 59,372 people had buttock augmentation procedures worldwide, by 2017 that number had soared to 372,496. So while the standard of beauty we’re being sold is different, is it any less damaging?
Meanwhile, we’ve had new debates on the lexicon we use: ‘body positivity’, ‘body acceptance’, ‘body neutrality’, ‘body liberation’, and ‘body politics’ have all had their proponents and their share of critics.
In recent years, there has been a rise too in advocates wanting to reclaim body positivity’s radical roots to combat the ways the movement has been watered down and co-opted by diet culture. When any political movement goes mainstream the voices that are raised are the least disruptive to the norm, and the people who exist on the furthest margins get left behind.
My position is the perfect example of that. Every platform I’m given is a result of the privilege my body has, while people with bigger bodies are still censored on social media and subject to fatphobic abuse. Trans and disabled people are also still treated as an afterthought in many body positive spaces, even though the message should be loud and clear by now: body positivity is about respect for all bodies.
So there’s no denying that our current body conversation is still deeply flawed. But there’s also no denying that the strides towards recognition, representation and the death of diet culture have been unignorable.
In 2015, I was taking an evening walk with my best friend. It was our usual prep for ‘bikini body’ season. I mentioned that I’d seen something online about people who’d stopped dieting and embraced their bodies instead, at any size. She said it sounded like a nice idea, but there wasno way it was actually possible.
We’ve still got a long way to go, but I think for the first time in recent history, it really does feel possible. That things might really be getting better. That body liberation could actually win the fight.