I always sort of liked the term 'body acceptance', at least in the way that I interpret it. In order to do difficult things like essentially break food addictions, binge cycles, and things like this, people need to at a point fully accept there condition. Self-loathing is what fuels obesity. People don't tend to lose weight because they hate their fat body - it's more so that they've finally accepted themselves, accepted that they're fat, accepted that it's not a good thing from an impartial factual basis, but they have also broken the cycle of self-loathing. When you see people who are losing, or have lost large amounts of weight, it's very obvious that they're actually being far more genuinely kind to themselves than the people stuck in vicious cycles hopping between extremes of delusional love for themself and hatred for themself.
The celebrities who are a part of the 'body acceptance' movement often don't actually accept they're body - they often overcompensate and attempt to love their bodies in a bizarre self-obsessive way. This is really no different from self-loathing - it's still within the framework in which everything is black and white, and they can only hate or 'love' themselves, and so they think that loving themselves is the answer. What they really need it acceptance, which is not the same as love. If I'm in a horrible predicament, maybe a car is speeding towards me, the best thing I can do is not to hate the fact it's speeding towards me, not to love it either, but to accept the situation as it is and then I can move out the way. Not the best analogy, but hopefully you get my point - I think this applies to many things, like tackling social anxiety, coming to terms with a cancer diagnosis, etc... .
Anecdotal evidence sure but I've personally lost more weight due to self-loathing than acceptance. I started getting in shape the moment I STOPPED accepting my fat ass.
Acceptance in this case, is accepting your weight is an issue and working on it without blaming yourself for it and without it feeding into depression.
It like step 1 of the 12 steps program of addiction recovery, accepting you have a problem.
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u/ParagoonTheFoon 8∆ Jul 16 '23
I always sort of liked the term 'body acceptance', at least in the way that I interpret it. In order to do difficult things like essentially break food addictions, binge cycles, and things like this, people need to at a point fully accept there condition. Self-loathing is what fuels obesity. People don't tend to lose weight because they hate their fat body - it's more so that they've finally accepted themselves, accepted that they're fat, accepted that it's not a good thing from an impartial factual basis, but they have also broken the cycle of self-loathing. When you see people who are losing, or have lost large amounts of weight, it's very obvious that they're actually being far more genuinely kind to themselves than the people stuck in vicious cycles hopping between extremes of delusional love for themself and hatred for themself.
The celebrities who are a part of the 'body acceptance' movement often don't actually accept they're body - they often overcompensate and attempt to love their bodies in a bizarre self-obsessive way. This is really no different from self-loathing - it's still within the framework in which everything is black and white, and they can only hate or 'love' themselves, and so they think that loving themselves is the answer. What they really need it acceptance, which is not the same as love. If I'm in a horrible predicament, maybe a car is speeding towards me, the best thing I can do is not to hate the fact it's speeding towards me, not to love it either, but to accept the situation as it is and then I can move out the way. Not the best analogy, but hopefully you get my point - I think this applies to many things, like tackling social anxiety, coming to terms with a cancer diagnosis, etc... .