Category: body image

Two images of Oprah, one current on the left, and a nine-year-old one on the right, with her holding a plate of weight-watchers-approved food. A look back at fallacies and Oprah
body image · diets · fitness

A look back at fallacies and Oprah

catherine wLeave a comment

For the past two weeks, I’ve been teaching fallacies in my critical thinking class. You know, those bad argument forms with latin names like post hoc ergo propter hoc and tu quoque. Philosophers ’round the world teach them so students can see more clearly how much bad reasoning is swirling around them, why it’s bad, and how not to fall prey to it. Not bad work if you can get it.

On Tuesday, while discussing the appeal to authority fallacy, I pulled up a slide with examples of cases where someone endorses a claim who is portrayed as an authority, but who, in reality, isn’t one. Enter Oprah.

Oprah giving a speech about WW, the rebranded name of Weight Watchers, in which she was financially invested.

As I tell my students, Oprah isn’t a nutrition authority– she’s not a nutritionist or dietician. That’s sufficient to illustrate the fallacy. But what I don’t say (because I’m teaching logic, not feminism or socio-cultural analysis) is that Oprah kind of IS an authority on weight loss (and weight gain), inasmuch as she’s done it dozens of times, all in public view. We’ve written about her a few times on the blog. You might check them out.

Oprah: Eating Bread, Making Bread by Tracy

Why Sam wants to hug Oprah by Samantha

And there’s my post from 2017 featuring fallacies, Oprah and the risks of celebrity meal plans and cookbooks. Take a look below and let us know what you think. Is WW on your radar screen? Is Oprah? What are you seeing and thinking? Let us know.

This week in diet fallacies: appeal to Oprah
Two male girafffes fighting in a way that looks like dancing. Learning more about bodies from dancing animals and physical therapy
body image · Dancing · fitness

Learning more about bodies from dancing animals and physical therapy

catherine wLeave a comment

Every chance I get, I share the dance song “I like to move it” video from the animated movie Madagascar. There are several reasons for this:

  • it’s got a killer dance beat
  • it’s funny
  • the animals all dance in interesting and animated-body-appropriate ways, but also in very different ways, depending on their bodies.

Watching it recently (yes, I shared it in this post) I was struck by how watching the hippo dance (apologies, I forget her name) puts me at a crossroads. I can laugh… or I can enjoy and appreciate the exaggerated ways her animated self expresses joy in movement.

Gloria– that’s her name– the hippo in the movie Madagascar, doing her booty dance to the end credits.

And then there’s Melman the giraffe, who also dances, sometimes with Gloria:

Hippo Gloria and giraffe Melman dancing cheek to cheek.

Giraffes probably have the textbook exaggerated and ungainly body– both in life and in cartoons. But they run and bend and stretch and (at least in movies) dance. Their repertoire of movements are also fascinating.

Which brings me to physical therapy. On Wednesday I was doing my hip exercises for sciatica, looking around the room to see what everyone else was up to. What did I see?

  • an older person with lots of flexibility stretching her hamstring;
  • a teenager recovering from an ankle sprain, bouncing a ball while standing on one foot on a foam cushion;
  • a 40-something, new to PT, doing gentle shoulder range-of-motion in work clothes;
  • an older person, one month after knee replacement, getting flexibility checked;
  • and me, working hard, sweating, enjoying the effort of strengthening my 60-something body.

All of us were there with different bodies with their own structure, vulnerabilities and history. We were all there to improve our movement while healing. We didn’t all like to move-it-move-it, but we did (move it, that is). We were all using the bodies we came in with and getting help with strength and flexibility and stamina.

I’m almost through my round of PT, and I’m happy with the results. I’m just as happy to get this infusion of body acceptance. And of course, to be reminded of those fabulous dancing animals… 🙂

Readers, have you danced this week? If so, let me know. If not, how about putting on a track and moving your body, however it does that?

Aubrey Gordon's book You just need to lose weight and 19 other myths about fat people FIFI book club: “You just need to lose weight” and 19 other myths about fat people (section two)
body image · Book Club · fat · weight stigma

FIFI book club: “You just need to lose weight” and 19 other myths about fat people (section two)

catherine wLeave a comment

CW: in-depth discussion of anti-fatness myths and people’s experiences around body shaming.

Welcome back to installment two of the FIFI book club’s review of You just need to lose weight and 19 other myths about fat people, by Aubrey Gordon. If you missed last week’s post, you can access it below.

FIFI book club: You just need to lose weight, and 19 other myths about fat people

This week, we are talking about section two, which is about health-related myths foisted upon fat people. Here they are:

  • myth 6: obesity is the leading cause of death in the US
  • myth 7: BMI is an objective measure of size and health
  • myth 8: doctors are unbiased judges of fat people’s health. Fat people don’t like going to the doctor’s office because they don’t like hearing the truth.
  • myth 9: fat people are emotionally damaged and cope by “eating their feelings”.

Sam’s comments

The second part of Gordon’s book is about health myths related to fatness. She does a good job with the issues which will be familiar to readers of this blog. The one I’d like to chime in on is the one that drives me wild because it’s one I encounter among otherwise progressive, body accepting people. It’s Myth 9, “Fat people are emotionally damaged and cope by ‘eating their feelings.’”

Gordon takes on the concept of ‘emotional eating’ which came into vogue in the 70s and was the way Weight Watchers’ founder Jean Nidetch framed her own journey to weighing too much. On this view of overweight and obesity, fatness comes to be as a response to trauma. Fat people have endured horrible experiences and turn to food for emotional comfort. Deal with the trauma, cease the emotional eating, and a normal body size will emerge.

Of course, while this matches the experience of some fat people it’s too simple in a few different ways. First, it ignores the genetic aspects of our body size and in families, you’ll see people who have different experiences, not everyone has a traumatic childhood, but many or all of the family members share a body size. Second, lots of people engage in emotional eating and don’t get fat. Emotional eating may not always be a healthy response to the bad stuff in our lives but it doesn’t necessarily lead to weight gain.

To this I’d add the thing I’ve blogged about, not all emotional eating is unhealthy. 

See also Four worries Sam has about intuitive eating. Here I raise the worry that the emotional eating framework becomes yet another way to judge and blame fat people, especially fat women.

“You’re supposed to only eat because you’re hungry. Intuitive eating, done right, is supposed to land you at the right weight for your size (see above). Therefore, larger people must be eating for reasons besides hunger. You’re supposed to be vigilant about emotional eating. So often there’s judgments about mental and emotional health of fat people, as if we can read your emotional well-being off the number on the scale. It assumes that if you take care of your mental and emotional health your weight will fix itself. And that you can tell that people–and here pretty much we mean women–are emotionally unstable, because they’re fat. Just no.”

See also Catherine’s Comfort eating– it’s not gonna kill you, and may even be beneficial (says science)

To sum up, I liked this section on health but I think you almost need a whole other section on myths about emotional health and larger bodies.

Diane’s comments

This section didn’t hold a lot of surprises. I really liked the attempt to asses the causality of obesity related to various diseases. As I now deal with arthritis-related joint pain and high blood pressure, I get anxious about whether I could be doing something more to help myself. I would happily have read a lot more about this topic as I’m still not confident I understand all the nuances around where there are legitimate causal links (while fully supporting the well-argued case that fat does not necessarily cause disease and that many other factors including poverty and genetics are at play).

The one surprise was in Myth 8. I have heard from friends abut their experiences with doctors demonstrating anti-fat bias by dismissing health concerns and focusing instead on their weight, but I didn’t know that getting this short shrift was a literal thing – fat people actually have shorter appointments.

Amy’s comments

The second section was just as informative as the first, and Gordon tackles some great myths here. One of the ones that struck me was Myth 8 “Doctors are Unbiased Judges of Fat People’s Health.” As we know is true almost universally, humans are biased. We are all produced in particular systems and structures that often lead us to bias, both conscious and unconscious. Doctors are no different. Here Gordon goes on to provide data taken from medical training environments regarding people with higher weights and larger bodies. She offers studies in which some of those bias were reduced with small tweaks to the environment or educational information.

I’m often stymied by friends, many of whom are academic researchers themselves, who take information from their medical doctors at face value. Even when they are told by others that the info may be biased or out of date, they insist that the physician must be correct simply because they are a doctor.

One friend in particular was told by an “ob*s*ty specialist” that they would die if they didn’t reduce their body weight. They embarked on a lengthy “treatment” process of what was essentially a (reduced) calories in/(elevated) calories out model. When confronted with the notion that a) this doc was making a (lucrative) living off convincing higher weight folks that they need to lose weight and b) the dangers and stats on weight cycling, the friend doubled down by insisting that they “just didn’t want to die.”

The fear mongering that can happen in the medical community around weight and body size is truly astounding to me, and Gordon captures quite a lot of the foundation for these tactics in this chapter.

The chapter on emotional eating also stuck out for me, not so much because of the negative valence attached to emotional eating (though there is that too) but for the identifying of the assumption that anyone who is fat must be engaging in it. This chapter does a great job of really pulling the curtain back on the way no one questions “naturally thin” people but the default assumption about someone fat is that they must be doing something “wrong” (in this case engaging in “emotional eating” in response to trauma).

Tracy’s comments

The chapter on emotional eating also stuck out for me, not so much because of the negative valence attached to emotional eating (though there is that too) but for the identifying of the assumption that anyone who is fat must be engaging in it. This chapter does a great job of really pulling the curtain back on the way no one questions “naturally thin” people but the default assumption about someone fat is that they must be doing something “wrong” (in this case engaging in “emotional eating” in response to trauma).

In general this book has so far been a been a very uncomfortable read for me as someone who has relative thin privilege and who has been a proponent of intuitive eating.

And here are my (Catherine’s) comments

These days, I spend a good bit of my professional research and speaking time on myths 6 and 7, giving talks and writing about 6) how higher body weights are not (I repeat, not!) correlated with all-cause mortality; and, 7) how BMI is not (I repeat, not!) an indicator of health. Gordon’s chapters on these myths are superbly done and precisely documented with studies to back up her rejoinders to these entrenched myths. Her citations are but a small sample of the comprehensive literature showing that the relationships between body weight and mortality risk, and between body weight and disease are not simple and are not linear. They are complex, nuanced, and modulated by genetic, genomic, environmental, and other factors.

Yes, science is complicated. And the science of human metabolism is especially complicated. But anti-fat bias plus the desire for simplicity drives medical beliefs and practices that have been oversimplified to the point of falsehood.

Take BMI as an example. It’s easy to calculate someone’s BMI. All you need are a tape measure (for height), a scale (for weight), and a BMI table. Anyone in any primary care practice can measure and weigh people reasonably accurately and very cheaply. So BMI is a cheap and easy metric to use. The problem is, it doesn’t actually measure what medicine and public health are looking for, which is something like “risk of disease/death due to degree of fatness or thinness or body shape, relative to height”.

I am here to tell you today that IF there were some biometric(s) that predicted disease or mortality risk in virtue of one’s size or amount of fatness or type of fatness or distribution of bodily fatness, they wouldn’t be simple or easy or cheap to measure. We know this already: there are loads of studies that use metrics like fat-free mass and others to investigate their possible correlations with e.g. mortality risk. Based on initial research, those possible correlations are complicated, change during the life course, and they require very expensive equipment not found in doctors’ offices.

As of right now, medical science doesn’t have any easily accessible, clearly interpretable, agreed-upon metrics that predict disease or mortality risk due to fatness. When I’ve given talks to physicians’ groups about how bogus BMI is, they (sometimes grudgingly) accept the data, but during the Q&A a few will inevitably fall back on the assumption that increased body weight is always a negative medical indicator. I get that healthcare providers are constrained by time, insurance billing codes and regulations, and the need to address complex and urgent health problems with limited tools. But BMI is just not one of those tools. It’s a blunt object, and every single fat person (myself included) is done with being bludgeoned by it.

Readers, are you reading this book? Do you have any thoughts about this week’s myths? Let us know.

Martha Stewart Martha Stewart, Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Cover Model
aging · beauty · body image · fitness · inclusiveness · objectification · stereotypes

Martha Stewart, Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Cover Model

elan.paulson1 Comment

At 81 years old, billionaire and business mogul Martha Stewart is the oldest swimsuit cover model of Sports Illustrated, overtaking Maye Musk, who was the oldest last year at 74.

What can be thought about this development?

On one hand, we can celebrate new gains for representation and inclusion: Martha Stewart has cut through the spandex ceiling, making it possible for “older women” to be cover photo-worthy by Sports Illustrated (SI), a magazine whose annual swimsuit issue authoritatively confers the status of beautiful to its models. As an octogenarian swimsuit model, Martha Stewart brings diverse body image to popular media (and to the news media that reports on popular media).

As well, this development signals a growing acceptance of older women’s sexuality. Martha Stewart has left the kitchen and entered the swimming pool. According to a CBC analysis article, Martha Stewart said on Today that she increased her exercise regime and cut out carbs (but didn’t starve herself) to show that “You can look great at pretty much any age if you put your mind to it.” If Martha Stewart can put her mind (and enormous wealth) towards looking sexually alluring at 81, isn’t that permission for us all?

On the other hand, scholar (and aspiring clairvoyant?) @tracyisaacs might have foreseen Martha Stewart’s gracing of the cover of SI’s Swimsuit issue when she wrote about what she describes as inclusive objectification here at FIFI and in The Conversation. Tracy acknowledges that commercializing the sexual attractiveness of a wider spectrum of women’s bodies seems, on the surface, to be a good thing (or at least not harmful one). However, mainstream media, embodied by the swimsuit issue (pun intended),

“continues to promote sexual attractiveness as women’s main currency. […] (It’s) it’s not clear how the swimsuit issue, the very essence of which is to represent a particular type of sexualized bodies, could morph into something that celebrates the body in a different way.”

From this perspective, it may be said that Martha Stewart has escaped one form of traditional female currency (homemaker) to another (swimsuit cover model). SI has shown us that Martha Stewart is worthy of sex appeal, but nothing has fundamentally changed the “relentless message about what makes women worthy,” as Tracy notes.

The CBC analysis article quotes Anna Murphy, who finds it refreshing that Martha Stewart refuses to “age out of the public eye.” (This is a return to modeling for Martha Stewart). But the SI issue heavily suggests that, in order to stay in the public eye, Martha Stewart must, in her own words, continue to “aspire to look great.”

Let’s also note that Martha Stewart doesn’t look great on her own. The are four covers of the same magazine issue —featuring Megan Fox, Brooks Nader, and Kim Petras, singer and transgender model (perhaps the most interesting and progressive choice). So conventional sexy and controversial sexy can remain in the public eye together.

Author of the CBC article, Jenna Benchetrit, concludes her analysis with an unanswered question initially asked by Tracy: “It’s breaking barriers, yes. But are these the barriers we want to break?” We at FIFI have many diverse voices, so I speak for myself when I (and maybe some of we) say no. Or at least, certainly not only.

Another Jenna, Jenna Peterson, happens to answer Jenna B’s question in a humorously memed social media post. Jenna P doesn’t want to continue to “aspire to look great” as she ages. Jenna P sees “aging out” of sexy as precisely what she wants to accomplish.

“I hate this whole “women can be sexy at fifty!” narrative. At what age will society stop demanding I try to be hot and just let me turn into an old swamp witch, as nature intended.”

As a cis-woman who is just over half Martha Stewart’s age, I’m inclined to agree with Jenna P. Aside from discourse of what is “natural” for women (for instance, it doesn’t matter much to me whether or not Martha Stewart has had body modifications), women can transgress their worthiness via sexual objectification…by letting themselves just get (and look) old.

Perhaps Sports Illustrated might have photographed an 81 year-old, swim-suited Martha Stewart emerging from a witchy swamp? Well, maybe next year.

Readers, what perspective do you take on this issue?

body image · boxing · fitness · weight stigma

The world is changing its perception of larger active bodies but not Garmin

Sam B3 Comments

So it turns out, according to Garmin, that my fitness age is 74. My fitness is poor and I’m in the bottom 5 percent for my age bracket.

Colour me shocked.

I thought it was because of inactivity due to knee replacement surgery. Garmin doesn’t track my weightlifting or my physio so all it knows are my steps per day, heart rate, rest, and numbers of kilometers ridden. And yes, it’s true I’m just riding 50 km a week on the trainer right now. That’s down from my usual 100 or 150. My step goal is in the 5000-6000 range and I meet it most days but that’s down since I had knees that worked.

Still it seemed wrong. I wouldn’t think that someone who rode their bike 50 km each week and walked more than 5000 steps each day would be in the bottom 5%. My resting heart rate is in the low 60s and that’s pretty good too.

It’s true I’m not my usual fitness self but bottom 5%?

So I googled how Garmin calculates fitness age and I remembered one more piece of information Garmin has, my weight.

Argh. Argh. I should have guessed. I should remembered Nicole’s blog post about this. And in her case there was only a two year gap. The gap between my actual and Garmin’s fitness age for me is 16 years.

Good gravy.

Bundling weight into the definition of fitness doesn’t even make sense to me. You can no longer ask about the relationship between fatness and fitness because on this way of measuring fitness, the weigh scale is built in.

I was embarrassed at first to blog about this. I shut off the Garmin app and stormed around the house a bit. I did some chores in a loud grumpy fashion. But the more I thought about it the more I realized it’s their problem, not mine. I’m going to write and ask them about. I’ll let you know if I hear anything back.

Not me but a woman with pink boxing gloves who kind of looks like I feel.
a silver water bottle with the logo "body positive zone" On revisiting the body positive zone (reblog)
body image · fitness

On revisiting the body positive zone (reblog)

catherine w1 Comment

This week I went to the American Philosophical Association Eastern meeting in Montreal to give a talk and to see friends and colleagues. Sam and Sarah and I breakfasted and chatted, and I saw and talked with many other friendly feminist philosophers. The Eastern APA meetings are traditionally one of the big conferences in my field, and used to be the site for most of our academic job interviews. So you would see scads of young, anxious besuited graduate students standing around in groups or rushing to the candidates’ area to look in their folders for messages about upcoming interviews. There would also be throngs of tweed-jacketed men of various levels of prestige, all in search of the perfect conversational clutch: a combination of the famous, the fashionable, and the eager hangers-on. At least it seemed that way to me.

But not anymore. Those days are gone.

In addition to being a much smaller conference (thanks, Covid), the Eastern APA is now a scene of mostly casually-dressed people who look relatively happy to be there… Gone are the crowds of anxious job candidates and interviewers; most universities have shifted to Zoom interviews (and then campus visits for finalists). The dress code has relaxed considerably, too. I saw people wearing sensible clothing, interesting clothing, warm clothing (it was Montreal in January, after all). Most of all, I saw my outfit (jeans, shirt, pretty sweater, some jewelry and sensible winter shoes) as all part of the conference clothing mosaic. This is such a good thing.

Then I remembered this post from 2016 about Visiting the Body Positive Zone. I was at a conference of friendly feminist philosophers, and I felt this level of comfort with what I was wearing, how I was presenting that felt different and good. It also felt unusual.

Six years later, I don’t feel so much like I visit body positive zones. Rather, I contribute to body positive atmospheres in the world by bringing my own positive sense of self and get validated and supported by seeing others acting similarly. This isn’t limited to professional conferences. We can and do bring our own little positive zones to the beach, the park, the classroom, the office, you name it.

Take a look at my post from 2016, and see what you think. Has your view of body positive zones shifted in the past six years? Are you still looking for such zones in your life? I’d love to hear from you.

-catherine

Visiting the body-positivity zone: I should go there more often
aging · body image · fitness

When magazines tell one story, but advertisers another

Sam B2 Comments

CW: Offensive ads

Awhile back Tracy and I were interviewed for a piece to appear in Chatelaine magazine about body positivity and midlife women. The article Where’s The Body Positivity Movement For Midlife Women? by Lisa Mesbur appeared today online. Lisa has lots of great things to say and not just the quotes from Tracy and me. You should definitely go read it!

Sadly though one reader of the blogger wasn’t happy with the ads she got served up along with the article. It’s kind of unbelievable. Now I know the ads are personalized to some extent. I don’t get these ads. My ads clearly don’t know I’m continuing my no shopping commitment. My ads are all Fluevogs!

But blog reader Kimberly got this mess of awful advertising which is about the opposite of midlife body positivity.

Argh! Whether it’s the magazine or the browser that’s serving up the ads, they certainly give you some idea of the challenges to body image in midlife.

UPDATE: My son looked at the article and he got a lot of ads for thyroid, aging, and weight gain!

body image · eating · intuitive eating · overeating

At the holiday party food table (why Tracy steers clear of the “I really shouldn’t” trap)

Tracy I
Image description: Christmas tree ornament of a flat ceramic cardinal hanging on a tree, blurred background of coloured Christmas lights, snow falling. (Photo: Tracy Isaacs)

Eight years ago I posted about the mixed messages in magazines and online during the holidays, where we are at once surrounded by incredible recipes for special occasions (see the Canadian Living feature “Holiday Treats Packed with Love”) and by strategic guidelines for navigating the holidays without gaining weight (i.e. “if you’re at a party, position yourself away from the food table” — I said to myself never). My post “Eat! Don’t Eat! Holiday Magazine Mixed Messages” rings true today too, with the more recent twist over this decade of social media as a major source of these conflicting narratives of indulgence and deprivation.

Really what this all means to me is that many people live a tortured, socially and culturally induced relationship with food that makes a direct experience of pleasurable eating some sort of small victory. I don’t even know if it’s possible to make it through an entire evening during the holidays without being exposed to at least one person, if not multitudes, loading up their plate with holiday treats packed with love while saying “I really shouldn’t.”

Do I have a solution for this? Not really. My main strategy is DO NOT ENGAGE. A party is not the time to explain to people that we live in a toxic diet culture that has robbed so many of the simple pleasure of holiday eating. It is, after all, just eating. It does not (as I recently read in Geneen Roth’s wonderful book Women, Food and God) lead to rapture. Neither does eating to the point of the “oh-gollys” (a term coined by a high school friend of mine to describe the feeling of “oh golly, I ate too much.”) No one wants to have that conversation at that moment.

Another reason not to engage is that it is very likely to lead into talk of new year’s resolutions (i.e. “indulge” now and put the deprivation off until later). A food table at a party is not the place to remind people that they will not in fact be a different person on January 1st, and deprivation then will feel just as deprivation-y as it will right now.

The final reason not to engage is that no matter how fortified I feel I am against the onslaught of mixed messages, where what I believe and know to be true hits up against a lifetime of “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts,” I too can slide into second-guessing myself if I’m exposed too long to the dominant narrative. I’ve worked hard to combat it and I don’t want to go there, especially when I’m trying to enjoy myself and a delicious piece of vegan brie with hot red pepper jelly on a slice of olive oil-brushed crostini.

I wish I had more of a “how-to” today, but really all I have to offer is my best wishes for an enjoyable season and however much luck you need to get to the other side, where, thankfully, we will all still be the same people we are today.

Things that make you smile, the body positive, Friday edition
body image

Things that make you smile, the body positive, Friday edition

Sam B

It’s November. That’s my grumpy and sad month. So I am making an effort to note the things that make me smile. Here are some body positive things in the news this week.

Judging by the reaction on our Facebook page, this story made lots of people smile: A pro-fat camp for women? Sign me up. There was a lot of “Count me in!” and “I’m signing up!” and “Loooooove this!”

“Camp Roundup, a summer camp experience for fat women that was conceived of by a pair of friends, Alison Rampa and Erica Chiseck, was held for the first time this year in Newark, Ohio. The duo was inspired to create the camp after listening to an episode of the “Maintenance Phase” podcast that tackled the twisted history of fat camps. In the episode, hosts Michael Hobbes and Aubrey Gordon spoke about how, for decades, fat camps have shamed children for their bodies, resulting in eating disorders and the spread of beliefs that diets are effective and being fat is inherently bad. Though weight loss camps are marketed as solutions to childhood obesity, they actually spread unhealthy calorie restrictions, fad diets and intense workout sessions. As of 2019, roughly two dozen fat camps were still operating across the United States. After learning about the history of these camps, Rampa and Chiseck wondered how different their lives might have been — and how different life might be for their own children one day — if there had been a camp for fat celebration.”

Lizzo dresses up as Miss Piggy!

“Shortly after transforming herself into Marge Simpson for Halloween, Lizzo took on another absolute icon for her second costume of the season: the one and only Miss Piggy. The star shared a handful of photos and videos of her tribute to the Muppet queen on Instagram, including a few where she recreated a famous pic of Piggy posing “nude” (can Muppets be nude?) with a snake draped around her body. 

“A tribute to my forever icon, MISS PIGGY. The epitome of grace, style, confidence and a warrior for love. @realmisspiggy i love you,” Lizzo wrote in her caption, though the Piggy herself has yet to respond to the glorious look. In the photo, Lizzo dons a platinum-blonde curled wig just like Miss Piggy’s, plus a pink pig nose and ears. In a video of the costume, Lizzo sets the reveal of her look to Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s ubiquitous “W.A.P.,” calling the slinky and sexy look a “W.A. Piggy” moment.”

Disney introduces first plus-size heroine in animated short Reflect

“Disney has debuted its first plus-size female protagonist in a short film that is being praised for exploring body positivity and overcoming self-doubt. The animation, Reflect, tells the story of Bianca, a young ballet dancer who “battles her own reflection, overcoming doubt and fear by channelling her inner strength, grace and power”. It forms part of Disney’s Short Circuit series of experimental films, released over the Disney+ streaming service last month. The six-minute feature has been pitched as an uplifting tale of conquering body dysmorphia and self-doubt.”

This list of affirmations in the spirit of body neutrality also made me smile.

Body neutral affirmations

Anything in the world of feminism, fitness, and body positivity that made you smile this week? Share your news in the comments below.

body image · diversity · fitness

Love Your Body

Sam B

By Martha Muzychka

Bodies



Look at all the lovely bodies. All kinds of shapes and all kinds of sizes!

I saw this display of of pre classic bodies and my heart skipped a beat.

Look how different they all are. Each tells a story.

These days we are so focused on hyper skinny shapes, we forget our round parts, our squishy bits, our mom soft bellies, our strong arms and open hearts that hug and hold and work and soothe and love.

Love yourself today. Celebrate what your body is and what it does.

No one else will do it for you.