Can you want to lose weight and still be body positive?

Can you be anti-diet culture and align with the body confidence movement and intentionally lose weight? Are the two mutually exclusive?

I think about this question a lot. Mainly because it’s something that appears to crop up in my DMs every day – women admitting to me that they feel like frauds because they believe in rejecting beauty standards and embracing their bodies, but they still want to lose weight.

First off, let’s recognise that we now live in a world with very conflicting messages around body image. For every person offering us weight loss tips, another person is telling us to love our bodies. The latter is, of course, positive – the more we can shift to celebrating the skin we’re in and away from weight loss being the answer to everything, the better.

But the reality is that it’s just not that easy to drown out the weight loss tips and the ubiquitous messages around thinness and fatness (thin = good, fat = bad) and eradicate our internalised fatphobia overnight, especially because body acceptance only hit the mainstream very recently. So there has to be a transition period, and we need to be afforded space to vocalise our genuine feelings and safely unlearn the conditioning we’ve received without being shamed for not living up to yet another standard.

Shame is rarely effective at producing a positive outcome, yet the anti-diet culture and body positivity spaces can sometimes feel hostile to anyone who expresses a desire to shrink their body or embark on a weight-loss regime. I’ve seen it several times: people who have been prevalent in the #BoPo space on social media have been banished for attempting to lose weight – despite them stating very clearly that it was for either physical or mental health reasons rather than aesthetic pressures.

This feels so wrong: kicking people out of what was once a safe space for exercising agency over their own body – whether this choice was informed by diet culture or not – is counterproductive to freeing women of beauty standards. The judgement just feels like another form of body shaming, especially for people who live in fat bodies and face weight stigma and fatphobia every single day: nobody has the right to add extra pressure.

Sometimes, people decide that they need to lose weight for various different reasons, and that’s OK; we have to allow body autonomy without shame (as long as they aren’t profiting from their weight loss, by pushing diets or selling products).

What we can do is encourage both other people and ourselves to explore the ‘why’ behind intentional weight loss. What’s motivating this change – can we really get to the root of the desire?

If it’s for health, it might be worth assessing whether weight loss is actually the answer: despite our society’s preoccupation with weight determining health, the reality is far, far more nuanced, and thin people can be unhealthy while fat people can be healthy. Health is incredibly complex and multi-faceted, and there are a multitude of factors that comprise health. I’m aware that weight-related health concerns are, however, difficult to dismiss when they are a focus of medical professionals.