I’ve been putting this post off for a while because it feels so out of character, and because I’m just a non-expert on all of this and am thusly hesitant to add my voice to the cybernoise. So here are some of the thoughts I was frantically trying to articulate in the audio diary ep this week:

1. I live in a well-represented, privileged body, and I have no experience with eating disorders, so don’t take my word for any of this.  I specifically recommend Dana Falsetti, @nolatrees on Instagram, and she plugs other good sources on real body positivity.
2. What is a represented body? Glad you asked. Courtesy of Dana, here you go:
3. I’ve personally been practicing not using the Whole30, or healthy eating practices in general, as just another avenue to weight loss and getting smaller.
4. People—including the creators of the Whole30—often conflate being healthy and feeling good with looking “awesome,” or “the way you want to look.” I’m intent on understanding what our reasons are for wanting to look a certain way, as well as what our collective definition of “awesome” is.
5. There’s a ton of marketing and business built around wellness, weight loss, and appearance; adjusting the language and branding to reference things like being fit and feeling great don’t change the fact that we’re being sold a particular image that we are supposed to spend money moving ourselves toward.
6. Some companies, like Kotex, Target, aerie, Rebel Wilson x Angels, and Darling, are making a conscientious effort to include more different kinds of bodies in their advertising campaigns. This is important because it draws the circle of the people that we find “acceptable to look at” wider and wider.
7. Sometimes we speak about body image as though there is a moral obligation to look a certain way: everyone should look like this, and they could if they just took these particular steps, so why haven’t they yet? In the same vein, it sometimes seems that people take on a personal duty in combating the obesity epidemic by publicly shaming or distancing themselves from bigger bodies. What does this accomplish?
8. I shrink away from anything that condemns the natural way a body entered the world, which is the only reason I felt moved to write/talk about this.
9. I encourage all of us to be constantly reconsidering the way we regard our own and others’ bodies, and to act accordingly.
10. Expose yourself to images and realities of people in bigger bodies portraying themselves; we all know you’ve seen them in airports, in certain parts of the country, or on the nightly news with their faces blurred out. But have you ever seen someone with a bigger body in a portrait of themselves that they helped style, direct, and shoot? It’s not just about seeing others in a different light, it’s about seeing them in a humanized, subjective way that they have chosen, rather than just looking at them.

{terrible audio disclaimer: my next one will be recorded from inside a closet, I promise.}