Body positivity is such a weight on my mind

‘Ugh, I’ve put on a lot of weight over lockdown,’’ I sighed down the Zoom to my friend. There was a sharp intake of breath, ‘‘Oh God, babes,’’ she sighed in the tones of hushed horror more befitting a minor cancer diagnosis, ‘‘you poor thing . . .’’

Hot embarrassment and irritation gushed into my stomach. Isn’t it the No 1 rule of girl-code that whenever a friend complains of putting on weight, one must violently deny it while making all kinds of comparisons to bean poles and uncooked spaghetti strands?

But, I then realised, I’d called the wrong friend. Never call a gym bunny for reassurance that you haven’t turned into a potato. All you’ll get is an earnest diatribe on the evils of eating more than four almonds a day.

This all started about 10 weeks ago when I weighed myself for the first time in forever and found out I’d put on 12 kilograms. I’d been determined then to use lockdown to hit the pilates apps hard, and emerge from the socially isolated chrysalis like a Terminator-esque butterfly with apocalypse-ready abs. What happened was obviously weeks of panic eating, exhaustion drinking and stress baking, and now I’m trying not to feel like an overcooked dumpling.

I politely excused myself, hung up, then immediately called my most impossibly feministy woke friend instead. ‘‘Don’t feel bad, girl,’’ she said immediately, ‘‘You’re still beautiful, remember every body is beautiful, no matter what size you are . . .’’ She began an impassioned soliloquy, but after a few minutes I realised that, instead of feeling better, I actually felt guiltier.

I’d been caught, yet again, by the failings of the body-positivity movement. Namely the fact that it doesn’t seem to work on me. Because while I agree with her, and genuinely believe that beauty comes in all sizes, I have extreme difficulty applying the same logic to myself.

I can nod along with everything she’s saying, but it doesn’t change my own desire to be thin. I can know all the exploitative tricks of the beauty industries. I can understand that being skinny doesn’t necessarily make you happier or hotter or healthier. I can reel off all the years we did in school about PhotoShop and diet culture. And yet I still want to lose weight.

So all that happens now is that I feel like a total hypocrite. And I’m not the only one.

Throughout lockdown I’ve been canvassing opinions on what everyone was most worried about. And one of the strongest replies, from girls and guys, was putting on weight. Yes, we know it’s dumb and, yes, we know beauty comes in every size, but yes, we’re still terrified of lockdown weight gain.

The worst part is that we can’t admit to any part of this carb-charged cognitive dissonance, because if we do then we’re not woke enough. Or we risk getting slammed for being fat-phobic.

I’ve written about my failure as a bodypositivity convert before, but I’ve never managed to figure out what’s at the heart of this inherent contradiction. Why is it that everyone agrees that beauty comes in every shape, but no-one wants to put on weight? Are we at best self-deluded hypocrites, or at worse just straight-up liars?

This is why the body-positive movement continues to fall short. The movement has made powerful strides in reshaping the imagery of the beauty industry. It’s tapped into our long-ignored desire to see bodies like our own, making it mandatory for brands to show real bodies in order to retain customer loyalty. It’s done amazing things in reshaping the socially acceptable face of beauty, and we can be genuinely stoked to see bodies like ours on screens.

But it doesn’t necessarily mean we stop hating our own. While the movement may work for branding campaigns, it’s far too blunt a tool to unpick the years of intricate, pugnacious selfloathing we’ve developed for our own fleshy pockets.

It suffers the problem all Instagram campaigns suffer – they’re pretty but shallow. It’s not nuanced enough to explain why we hate our bodies, what we want from them or how to dissolve the layers of shame and disgust built up over a lifetime.

Doing that requires the kind of complicated, ugly, blisteringly honest discussions ill-suited to social media’s instantaneous, reactionary nature. Instead, it tells you to love yourself without ever explaining how.

So no, you’re not a hypocrite or a liar for embracing body-beautifulism while still wanting to lose weight. You’re just an inevitable victim of the impossibility of applying the dinky dictat, ‘‘Love yourself!’’ to the unholy mess that is your internal life.

I genuinely believe that beauty comes in all sizes, [but] I have extreme difficulty applying the same logic to myself.