What Makes Body-Acceptance Risky Business

By Jane Shure

I was a junior in high school when acclaimed writer and feminist activist, Gloria Steinem, helped found Ms Magazine. Coming of age at a time when women and men were encouraged to question authoritative messages about  gender roles and rights, profoundly influenced me. So imagine my excitement last week, when attending the 20^th Annual Renfrew Center Foundation Conference, “Honoring the Past, Embracing the Future,” with Gloria Steinem featured as the keynote presenter.

There we were, 700 eager psychotherapists and nutritionists, who daily work on the front lines helping people struggling with eating disorders. Gloria inspired us all, as she explored feminism among contemporary women and offered new ways of understanding the current climate in which women continue to struggle for equality. “If we are going to change the ethic where size 0 is an admirable norm, then we need to stand up and break the silence,” she guided. “It continues to be the simple acts of speaking out about our truths and challenging the myths” that exposes the cultural lies that harm us.

There was something in the simplicity of her message that I found empowering. In my own life, healing and growth has flourished when I’ve been safe to share my “truth” and expose the shame and embarrassment from my experiences. Safety always came from the same conditions - an absence of  judgment

“If we don’t take risks, we don’t make progress,” commented one of the conference attendees. She went on to share that her “most major risk is body acceptance.” That line caught my ear since I know that it’s only when we do accept our real bodies - the ones with curves and creases, blemishes and imperfections - that we grow in self-esteem and confidence. What are we actually risking if we accept our bodies? Are we risking living with more reasonable standards, ones that are achievable and sustainable? Are we risking learning to value what we have and minimize focusing on what we don’t have? Are we risking having brighter moods that empower us rather than attitudes that diminish us?

I asked Steinem to comment on this remark about body-acceptance and think her response was spot on:  ”If you accept your body, you then have to admit that you can’t fix it. We have ‘Ms. Fix-It’ complexes. When you admit that you can’t fix it, you are admitting you can’t control it … then you have to learn how to live with it.”

So we’ve got to ask - what’s so hard about learning to live with our imperfect selves? When we are bombarded at every turn with messages encouraging us to feel inadequate, we absorb it and are at risk for turning our bodies into civil war zones. In her brilliant understanding of the way patriarchal power gets used to dominate and control, Gloria Steinem reminded us that there is likely to be a backlash when women achieve power. “A way to stop that power is for the patriarchy to accuse: ‘It’s your fault and your body’s fault.’ If you can’t achieve body invasion, then you try, desperately, to control every other form of it - which is eating.”

We are sold the message that we’ll feel better when we fix our defects and improve ourselves. The advertisers hook us into believing their lies and we suffer under their selfish influence.

“Perfect is boring,” said the tireless pioneer for women’s empowerment. “I’m talking major league boring. There is no perfect. If you look at a beautiful flower, it’s irregular, not perfect.” Feminism has always taught me to value the strengths that are mine. It’s encouraged me to recognize my femaleness as qualities worthy of celebrating rather than abandoning in exchange for actions and appearances more reflective of males. As a psychotherapist, it is only when I rejected male notions of distance and aloofness and replaced them with values of connection, active expressions of compassion, and resistance to shaming, that I grew into my strength and competency.

While I agree with Steinem that “it continues to be the simple acts of speaking out about our truths that help to challenge the myths,” I’ve learned that it matters who you speak your truth to. Not everyone is capable of listening or being open minded. Many hold rigid notions of right and wrong and condemn those who differ with stances of righteousness. These are the folks from whom we need to keep our distance. I’ve learned that it’s a waste of my energy to appeal to those who are closed minded and think they know what’s best for all.

Seek out others who are capable of being open-minded for that’s where we can find personal safety and nourishment for our soul.  Dare to be heard and seen, dare to expand your sense of courage, and perhaps most challenging of all, dare to accept your body and yourself. For more, click on http://janeshure.com/blog and http://selfmatters.org

A friend of mine wrote: I struggle with the Great Steinem’s pronouncements, here. Seems she has spent a long time away from the working & middle classes where denial about BMI is doing serious damage. Two studies this week - one on a longitudinal study of the effe…cts of high BMI, another on how overweight people tend to see themselves as fit while too-thin people see themselves as fat - could be problematic in their class connections but a walk through a Walmart in most parts of the country sends a rather strong message that no matter what GS and the magazines say or show, zero is anything but the “norm.” I write this as someone who turned in a pathetic performance on a stress test this morning. I think I need a little MORE “fix it”-ism…

I wrote back: I hear you…you make an important point that some of us are hooked on overdrive to “fix” ourselves and some of us are hooked on being in under drive about mindful eating and consistent exercise. The BMI’s are a major problem - major problem.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-shure/how-to-diet—-the-dietin_b_535062.html

I’ve been waiting a long time for this day. Oprah has finally come to see the light, recognizing that dieting promoted more of her negative body image rather than remedy it. This is a huge leap forward and provides hope that her influential voice may now be heard touting a different, more empowering public message.

A lifelong devotee of weight loss at any cost, Oprah has come to see that her years of yo-yo dieting have kept her on a roller coaster ride of weight gain, weight loss, with concomitant highs of excitement and lows of defeat, never guiding her toward fuller body-esteem. “I don’t like the term food addict,” she said recently in O, The Oprah Magazine, “but I realize that I’ve been one, and it has taken me years to learn (and relearn) that the choices we make about what we put in our mouths are only stand-ins for the beliefs we carry in our minds and our hearts.”

Throughout her life, Oprah rejected her mesomorph shaped body and revered the gods and goddesses of thinness, committing herself to battle with her hunger and her body. We know from watching the changes in her physical self, that Oprah struggled with the demons that drive obsessions with food, weight and body size. As a professional keenly aware of the complexities involved with body image, I’ve ached at particular moments when Oprah’s actions lent direct endorsement to the diet industry’s marketing gurus, reinforcing messages that encourage striving for a body size, shape, and thus, image, discrepant from one that can be sustained with a healthy approach - involving acceptance of our genetic body structure, willingness to feed our bodies enough foods to quell hunger and sustain energy and the practice of speaking to ourselves without judgment and blame for “who we are not,” and “what we do not look like.”

After all, we live within our bodies; they are the vessels that house us. If we support attitudes of dislike toward our bodies, not accepting them and cherishing for all they do for us, our deepest self suffers.
Oprah was hooked on the fanatasy that having a different body would heal her deepest wounds and release her into a life of internal ease. In fact, years of dieting did nothing of the sort for Oprah, nor does it do so for anyone else. Instead, it releases the follower in to a state of dis-ease…a path of continuous anxiety about how long they will stay at their worshiped weight and what they will feel like when they lose that “position” in life.

The statistics on dieting are staggering, suggesting that 95% of people who lose weight from diet regimes are certain to gain most of it back within a year or two. The multi-billion dollar diet industry seduces us into believing that cycles of dieting are the best way to achieve the “right” body for each one of us. They never admit that diets prevent us from learning how to regulate our body weight or balance our eating patterns, and they never mention that diets increase binging, moodiness, and the potential for developing an eating disorder -the full spectrum from anorexia to obesity - they don’t mention that patterns of dieting increase cardio vascular disease, type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis, and even some cancers.

Despite the facts, many of us fall under their spell and argue in favor of dieting - saying that it is healthy and good, even something to be admired and rewarded, a virtue worth pursuing. Talking to Oprah in March, author Geneen Roth, assures us that “Unless you really see what your core beliefs are, what’s making you overeat, and until you name those beliefs, they will shape your life willy-nilly. You’ll just keep acting them out by punishing yourself with food. But if you can finally get to understand the beliefs underneath, you can learn how to live.”