Body Neutrality, Body Positivity, and Letting Go of Body Management.

When I first started learning about body neutrality, it felt like relief.

For so many people — especially those coming from years of body shame, chronic dieting, disordered eating, or constant self-criticism — body positivity can feel inaccessible, performative, or even toxic. The pressure to love your body all the time can become just another thing to fail at. It can feel inauthentic at best.

Body neutrality offers something gentler: you don’t have to love your body every second. You don’t have to force gratitude or confidence or empowerment. You can simply exist in your body without making it the center of every thought. It's background.

And honestly? That can be incredibly healing. Most of us are not thinking about our bodies in our best moments. When we are laughing with people we love or watching a sunset or swimming in the ocean. When we are holding our child or creating something meaningful or falling in love. When we are fully immersed in joy or connection, we are just...living.

And I think that maybe that, in itself, is a form of neutrality. Not obsession or evaluation or hyperfocus, but just taking up space in your own life.

But lately, I’ve been wondering if neutrality is always the final destination. Because while there is something beautiful about no longer being consumed by thoughts about your body, I also think there can be space for something more. Not forced positivity or performative self-love. Not the "my belly grew a baby," and "my thighs get me around where I need to go," kind of reminders.

But maybe there is something in the quiet gratitude and the acknowledgment that your body has facilitated so much of your life. Your body is the reason you can taste your favorite meal, hug someone you love, cry during a song that moves you, feel warmth from the sun on your skin, laugh until your stomach hurts, breathe deeply after a difficult day. Your body is not just an object to be viewed or a vessel through which you experience life. It is the facilitator of that life.

And yet, so many of us have been taught to relate to our bodies primarily as projects to manage. Something to make smaller, leaner, more optimized, more controlled, more disciplined. We're trying to "biohack" our way into the "best" version of ourselves because where we're at now isn't good enough.

I hear this constantly in sessions, especially around comparison. We compare ourselves to what we see online, to our friends, to influences, to strangers. We look at what they eat, how they work out, how disciplined they seem, how their bodies look. And underneath that viewing, is the assumption that "they're doing it better than me."

But what does “better” even mean in this context?

If achieving the “ideal” body requires constant rigidity, obsession, food noise, body checking, fear around eating, isolation, or disconnecting from yourself… is that actually wellbeing?

We talk so much about health as though it exists only in food choices, exercise routines, and body size, while often ignoring the enormous impact that stress, shame, loneliness, and chronic nervous system activation have on the body.

There is a growing body of research showing that chronic stress and social isolation can significantly impact health outcomes, including blood sugar regulation, insulin resistance, inflammation, cardiovascular health, sleep, and overall well-being.

And yet many of the behaviors our culture praises as “discipline” around food and fitness are deeply stressful and isolating. Behaviors like skipping meals while ignoring hunger cues, constantly tracking and monitoring food, avoiding social situations because of anxiety around eating, feeling guilt or panic after eating something “off plan,” or that we've labeled as bad/junk/less-than, believing rest has to be earned, living in a near-constant state of self-surveillance.

That isn’t peace. This isn't improving the quality of life, even if the outcome is living in a smaller sized body.

I think we underestimate how harmful it can be to spend years at war with yourself, and we overestimate how much occasional processed foods, living in a larger body, or eating "imperfectly" determine someone’s overall well-being. I think we often mistake disordered behaviors for discipline because our culture rewards them. We see someone who is hyper-controlled around food and we label them as "healthy" or "clean eaters;" or we see a person who is constantly exercising and call them "committed," or we see a person who overrides their hunger and exhaustion and admire them for their "willpower" and "self-control." Social media then amplifies all of this.

We are constantly exposed to carefully curated snapshots of how other people eat, move, look, and live — often without any context for genetics, privilege, mental health, physical health, financial access, or what might actually be happening behind the scenes.

Comparison thrives in environments where context disappears. But human bodies were never meant to all look or act the same. A rose is not failing because it doesn’t look and act like a lily. We don’t stand in gardens criticizing flowers for not trying harder to become a different kind of blossom - they are just different expressions of life.

And yet so many people move through the world believing their bodies are personal failures if they don’t conform to one narrow ideal.

I think this is part of why embodiment matters and why neutrality isn't the end of the journey.

Not because we need to love our bodies all the time, but because we deserve to experience our lives from within them, instead of spending all of our time and energy trying to earn the right to have those experiences.

So, maybe the goal isn’t neutrality or relentless body positivity.

Maybe it’s learning how to stay connected to ourselves long enough to experience moments of joy, pleasure, grief, desire, connection, hunger, satisfaction, movement, rest, and aliveness without constantly filtering them through judgment. Maybe it’s learning to become a messy human again instead of becoming optimized.

Maybe it's about asking: "what kind of life do I want to live?" and chasing that life instead of chasing the body ideal we think somehow deserves that life more than we do now. Because you deserve it now.