“It used to be that you were either healthy or sick,” says Dr. Kessley Jamison, a clinical psychologist specializing in eating disorders. “Now, you are ‘optimal’ or ‘negligent.’ Wellness brands started selling the idea that if you aren’t bio-hacking, cold-plunging, and eating grass-fed liver, you are failing at existence.”
How do you hold space for radical body acceptance while also acknowledging that a diet of hyper-processed foods makes your joints ache and your brain foggy?
Coined by body-neutral and Health at Every Size (HAES) practitioners, joyful movement strips exercise of its punitive purpose. You don't run to burn off the cake. You run because the wind on your face feels glorious. You don't lift weights to shrink your thighs. You lift because you want to carry your groceries and your niece without pain. miss teen nudist year junior miss pageant
“Wellness, at its purest, is not about shrinking or sculpting,” says Dr. Jamison. “It is about sensation. Do you feel vital? Do you feel connected to your body? Or do you feel like a brain dragging a disobedient corpse around?”
And perhaps that is the only sustainable lifestyle there is: one where you are allowed to be a glorious work in progress, exactly as you are, right now. “It used to be that you were either
“You have to decouple health from weight,” says nutritionist Elena Zhou, author of The Gentle Nutrition Approach . “You can eat more vegetables because you love yourself and want to feel energetic, not because you hate your belly. That sounds simple. But it is the hardest psychological shift a person can make.”
For years, these two philosophies have circled each other like wary boxers. Body positivity accuses wellness of being diet culture in athleisure clothing. Wellness accuses body positivity of promoting complacency in the face of preventable disease. Coined by body-neutral and Health at Every Size
Studies from the Journal of Eating Disorders suggest that when people engage in wellness behaviors (like tracking macros or wearing a fitness watch) with a body-positive mindset, they see improved mood and sustainable habits. But when they engage with a weight-loss mindset, they see increased anxiety, bingeing, and eventual dropout.
But a new, more nuanced conversation is emerging from the wreckage of the 2010s "clean eating" era and the backlash against toxic Instagram fitness. The question is no longer whether you can love your body and want to change it. The question is how . To understand the tension, you have to look at the wounds. The original body positivity movement, born from the fat acceptance activism of the 1960s, was a social justice crusade against systemic weight discrimination. But by the 2020s, it had been diluted into a commercialized slogan.
Simultaneously, the wellness industry discovered a sinister new trick: .
In other words: Why you move matters infinitely more than what you weigh. Perhaps the most successful hybrid of these two worlds is a concept called Joyful Movement .