Health Matters

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How to start practicing body neutrality

By Annabel Gutterman

Content Strategy Editor

In the early 2010s, body positivity took social media by storm. I remember scrolling through Instagram and seeing posts from influencers about embracing their unedited flaws. But nearly a decade later, it seems like body positivity didn’t do much for anyone. (My feeds are now full of celebrities who are seemingly taking Ozempic to lose weight.)

We need to let go of the idea of body positivity and start thinking differently, writes Jessi Kneeland, author of the new book Body Neutral: A Revolutionary Guide to Overcoming Body Image Issues, in an essay for TIME. Instead of constantly celebrating our bodies, we should aim to be netural about them—a more achieveable goal. Here’s how to start:

Stop feeling like you need to embrace every dimple, jiggle, and inch. It’s unrealistic to suddenly fall in love with your entire body.
If you're feeling unhappy with your appearance, give yourself some compassion. Say your complaints out load, followed with a phrase like: “and that’s not a problem,” “and that makes sense and is OK,” or “and that doesn’t mean anything bad about me.”
Remember that if the goal is peace and acceptance, we have to work with and not against ourselves.

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AN EXPERT VOICE

"What’s happening on social media right now is a black box. We don’t understand it. We need to better understand it, and we need empirical research, but it's hampered by closed application programming interfaces."

—Don Grant, national advisor of healthy device management at Newport Healthcare

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Today's newsletter was written by Annabel Gutterman and Haley Weiss, and edited by Angela Haupt.

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"What’s happening on social media right now is a black box. We don’t understand it. We need to better understand it, and we need empirical research, but it's hampered by closed application programming interfaces."

—Don Grant, national advisor of healthy device management at Newport Healthcare