im gonna be a fucking sad fat piece of shit for the rest of my life. eating like garbage is my coping mechanism since i was a child and suprisingly becoming an adult and having to pay rent in an increasingly facist and late-stage capitalist world has surprisingly not really improved things. things are never going to get better and all i want to do is die

after school when i had a year of being very stable mentally and in my job i managed to lose twenty kilos and ride my bike for like 50km a day. i felt amazing. had a fucking accident broke my arm, started eating like shit again and gained it all back

i am never ever going to have the energy, stability and time to do that ever again. its never going to happen

fuck everything

the more i started caring about fitness the more vain and i guess bdd-mode i became because i found it was the only way i was able to make myself stick to it, internalising disgust at how i felt about myself. this isn’t something i’ve solved so it’s kind of an offhand comment but yeah. i’m not really sure what to do about it since i full well understand how this is bad intellectually but at a certain point it’s become almost reflexive.

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I’m very much the same. I always hate it when other people make comments or judgements about someone else’s appearance, because it’s incredibly rude and is based in patriarchal views of attraction and worth. But when it comes to myself, I struggle to extend that same belief. I do judge myself harshly for my appearance, and I think I would be happier if I was more conventionally attractive, which is really annoying. I obviously haven’t gotten over these shitty views that I’ve internalised, and it just hurts me.

But on a kind of related note, I find a lot of body positivity centers around telling people that they are attractive no matter what. Like, saying “all body types are sexy” or “fat is sexy”. And I don’t necessarily disagree, the people who say that aren’t necessarily malicious, but I think it’s the wrong message. It presents being attractive as the main form of value in one’s body, but extends attractiveness to everyone. There are many unconventionally attractive and convenientionally unnatractive people who can be found sexy, but that doesnt put an end to body shaming. Making body positivity a matter of attractiveness is not good.

What will you tell an asexual person who is unhappy with their body? “Oh don’t worry, you’re gorgeous, you’re sexy, people want to have sex with you” isn’t much reassurance when you don’t want to have sex or be seen as sexual. What will you tell a child? “Oh don’t worry, you’re fat but a lot of people are into that” is crazy inappropriate.

“Body positivity” might be the wrong term and message for actually building positivity. Instead of saying “fat is good” or “fat is bad”, just say “fat is fat”. Someone’s body holds no moral value, it’s a body, they change and are affected by the thousands of factors that affect our lives.

Someone perceived to be ugly doesn’t become valuable from someone being attracted to them. They’re valuable already, on account of being a living person.

Btw none of this is directed at anyone on here, this is just a build up of my thought as someone who is conventionally unnatractive.

You changed your life dramatically and found that your mental health also changed dramatically. I think that’s a reasonable thing to expect.

You’re allowed to shape your body how you like, even to conform to a system of aesthetics. Fitness is also a creative pursuit.

If you feel better about yourself, and aren’t mistreating others, take the win.

No one is immune to propaganda. We all have some stupid ideas because of it. At least you care enough to try to negate that.

Don’t discount the psychological benefits of exercise either. It can improve mood long before physical changes become noticeable. And other people respond positively to confidence as well as appearance.

this is kind of how I feel all the time

It’s good to strive to rise above societal programming but don’t be so hard on yourself for succumbing to it! Most people really need outside validation and I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with that, it’s very human. We’re social creatures it’s incredibly important to our development as individuals and as a species.

The other thing I’ll say is that often times unhealthy lifestyles can really affect you mentally. I know good food and exercise help my mental state a lot (even though I kinda disdain the concept).

There is something to be said for “feeling comfortable in your own skin”. As someone who has recently let themselves go a bit, I encourage all comrades to maintain their routines.

Fight for yourselves; I know it is not easy to do so.

Maybe it’s possible that your feeling better for reasons besides aligning yourself with beauty standards? For me at least there’s something personally empowering about making change to my body and apparence. Like it makes me feel confident just to be able to do it. Also working out is just really good for mental health on its own. If you feel confident and healthy that might translate to a better social life too.

I’m on my phone so I can’t really go In-depth, but my read from a very academic, very theory-heavy place, is that there are two separate things here, that we often conflate under the same umbrella because they are dialectically linked, but they work under different mechanisms.

One, is what Foucault would call the “policing of the body”: in short, western, capitalist, industrialized society has created all these institutions (like white supremacy, fatphobia, patriarchy, cishet normativity, neutotypicity, etc.) out of a necessity to exert control and have workers “fit into their place”, by pressuring on the physicality of the individual, sometimes materially, in the form of violence, but also shaping society’s functioning by the pervasive nature of these norms and their enforcement. Body positivity, as far as I know it, stems from a critical view of these systems of policing peoples’ bodies and their relationships, checking on those tacit assumptions and asking what purpose they serve in obstructing liberation. You can’t shake off the chains you don’t know drag you down and so on. I don’t have much more modern references for body positivity, so if anyone has a good read, I’d appreciate a recommendation!

So body positivity as a collective goal is a liberatory one, one where people aren’t being thrust upon them goals that serve only to undermine their agency. This can take the form of radical body acceptance and activism toward that goal, but it can mean reformulating and questioning the way we relate to ourselves and each other for example by identifying biases in medicine, and correlating body policing to other oppressive structures. The point is that the body should not be a site of oppression for anyone, no matter their shape or ability, and we should fight for that to be the case

On the other hand, (and I swear I’ll be brief here) you have mental and physical health, which no matter who you talk to, includes taking care of yourself, especially stemming from a place where you see yourself as a person with the right to dignity and a full life, to the best of your ability (disability is a completely different thing I’m extremely unqualified to talk about). As others have pointed out, you have made changes in your habits, and they seem to have had a positive impact on your mental and physical health, with the added bonus of making you feel better about the way you look. Of course, this last part is informed by the policing structures I spoke about before, but based on the liberatory framework of body positivity, only you, and you alone can gauge what that dignity and happiness looks like. I don’t think it’s vain to be happy with your choices having desired effects, it’s natural, even healthy in my opinion. It’s linked to what society expects us to look like and act, and that shapes the way people react to us, but it doesn’t invalidate your experiences.

All this to say that it’s not wrong to feel good about yourself after you’ve made changes to improve your situation. You’re not a martyr, and no one who cares about you should expect you to be happy in misery and miserable in abundance, that’s some weird protestant brainworms. There’s societal and psychological baggage that can and should be pushed against, and if you’re feeling good about yourself you’re going to be a much better part of our collective struggle.

The promised land is breaking your mind free of it’s shackles. If you can look at a six and be disappointed they aren’t an 8 you have robbed yourself of so much potential happyness. This is why capitalism has collectively and independently moved to make us try to feel those emotions and sell us remedies to them. The body fascism just makes everything worse. That being said we do all need to be working out to the extent we can should we ever need to be punching nazis and the like.

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If I firmly believe others shouldn’t be judged for their outward appearances, then why couldn’t I ever internalize it, why can’t I bring my mind and subconscious understanding to reflect what I’ve been taught to believe, what I think is right.

Your emotions are a lot less malleable than your beliefs. To have your emotional responses to things change, you need to reinforce those changes through experience and sometimes practice. It sounds like now you’ve had that reinforcement and you’re feeling better about yourself. If you still look back and judge your previous self, that’s a response that can be unlearned as well.