Multiple approaches to combating the BIC have been established over the last few decades, and a strong and growing foundation of research shows they’re effective at improving health, preventing eating disorders, and reducing the mood and anxiety problems that accompany body self-criticism. Though the approaches vary, they also have a lot in common: they all encourage you to (1) practice body acceptance, (2) embrace body diversity, and (3) listen to your body.
Those things are good for you.30 You should definitely try them.
But neither of us has ever met any woman whose relationship with her body was not in some way equivocal—and no wonder. It’s difficult to maintain body acceptance in the midst of the BIC, where you’re surrounded by images of the ideal and by loved ones who say, “But you’re going to lose the weight, right?”
Ambivalence is normal. So rather than aiming for “body acceptance,” practice “mess acceptance.” Turn toward the mess of noisy, contradictory thoughts and feelings with kindness and compassion. You know what’s true now—your body size doesn’t dictate your health; the Bikini Industrial Complex doesn’t care about your health; it’s all just patriarchy and capitalism and stuff—but knowing what’s true doesn’t magically cure it. Knowledge may be half the battle, but only half.
When you engage in physical activity, you know it’s good for you, because: completing the cycle and also: doing a thing. You also know that most people probably assume you’re trying to “lose weight” or “get in shape,” and part of you might still actively want to change the shape of your body. That’s all perfectly normal. Move your body anyway—because it really is good for you—and smile benevolently at the mess. Some days it will be messy as hell, other days it will be calm and clear, and every day is just part of the intensely body-neurotic world you happen to live in.
Strategy 2: You Are the New Hotness
All the evidence-based models also include some redefinition of “beauty.” When we reconstruct our own standard of beauty with a definition that comes from our own hearts and includes our bodies as they are right now, we can turn toward our bodies with kindness and compassion.
Easier said than done.
Amelia is vain about pictures of her conducting, in which she inevitably has her mouth wide open and her hair is a sweaty wreck. Emily watches herself on TV and worries that her chin is too pointy because one time, years ago, somebody said it was. Neither of us has ever had the skinny proportions of a model, and we watched our mom (who was model-thin before she gestated two seven-pound babies at the same time) look at her reflection in dressing room mirrors and cry at what she saw there. What she saw there is very much like what we see in our own reflections now.
Which is why we play the “New Hotness” game, a strategy for teaching ourselves to let go of body self-criticism and shift to self-kindness.
One day, Amelia was in a dressing room of a very fancy boutique, trying on gowns for a performance she had coming up. Attire for women conductors is hard to find: solid black with long sleeves, formal, professional, yet not frumpy is an unlikely combination. Finding all of this in her size, right on the boundary between “straight” sizes and “plus” sizes, is even more difficult. So there she was at the fancy store, and she tried on a dress that looked so amazingly good that she texted Emily a dress selfie, with a caption paraphrasing Will Smith in Men in Black II: I AM THE NEW HOTNESS.
And now “new hotness” is our texting shorthand for looking fabulous without reference to the socially constructed ideal.
We recommend it. It’s fun.
Maybe you don’t look like you used to, or like you used to imagine you should; but how you look today is the new hotness. Even better than the old hotness.
Wearing your new leggings today? You are the new hotness.
Hair longer or shorter, or a different color or style? New hotness.
Saggy belly skin from that baby you birthed? New hotness.
Gained twenty pounds while finishing school? New hotness.
Skin gets new wrinkles because you lived another year? New hotness.
Scar tissue following knee replacement surgery? New hotness.
Amputation following combat injury? New hotness.
Mastectomy following breast cancer? New hotness.
The point is, you define and redefine your body’s worth, on your own terms. Again and again, you turn toward your body with kindness and compassion.
It’s not necessary to turn toward your body with love and affection—love and affection are frosting on the cake of body acceptance, and if they work for you, go for it.31 All your body requires of you is that you turn toward it with kindness and compassion, with nonjudgment and plain-vanilla acceptance of all your contradictory emotions, beliefs, and longings.
We’re not saying that “beautiful” is what your body should be; we’re saying beautiful is what your body already is.
Strategy 3: Everybody Is the New Hotness
Writer, comedian, and fat-positive activist Lindy West discovered her new hotness from exposure to positive images of fat bodies, and recommends that other women “look at pictures of fat women on the Internet until they don’t make you uncomfortable anymore.” She says Leonard Nimoy’s The Full Body Project “came to me like a gift.” She had never seen fat bodies like hers “presented without scorn…honored instead of lampooned…displayed as objects of beauty instead of punch lines.” And she asked herself, “What if I could just decide I was valuable and it would be true?” And she felt it reshaping her brain. She later discovered the research that demonstrates that mere exposure to certain body types makes people prefer those body types.
At the end of some of her talks, Emily leads what she calls “The Beautiful Activity.” She has a set of fifty PowerPoint slides, each with the image of someone who goes by the pronoun “she,” along with the words “She is so beautiful.” One at a time, going around the room, participants look at the image they’re presented with and say out loud, “She is so beautiful.” Then the next slide comes up and the next person says, “She is so beautiful.” And the next slide, and the next person. There are women of every skin tone and hair texture, women with or without armpit hair, women in wheelchairs or with prosthetic limbs, women with single or double mastectomies, transgender women, androgynous women, women in burkas, women of every size, women of every age from their teens to their nineties.
The original idea of the exercise was that everyone in the room would see someone who looks like herself, and hear someone declare that person beautiful. But it turned out, even more powerful was the feeling of dissonance participants experience, seeing a body that they’ve been taught to perceive with aversion and being challenged to try on the idea that that body is beautiful. Emily has led this activity with everyone from college students to seasoned therapists to medical providers, and the response is the same: tears and an astonished awareness of how uncomfortable it is, at first, to view non-“ideal” bodies without judgment…and of how quickly it becomes a source of joy.