Working on neutrality — and it is an ever-evolving process — is ultimately about how you want to allocate your time and focus
Photo: Owen Franken/Getty Images It is late afternoon on a sunny day in Vermont and around a dozen people are gathered to talk about their bodies. They’re all staying at Green Mountain at Fox Run, a retreat where women stay from one week to several months to learn healthy eating habits and make peace with their bodies. It’s much more bare bones than a spa, and rather than focus on numbers, like a typical weight-loss program, the aim is to teach women how to change the way they think about food.
If we judged how we felt as a culture about our bodies just by Instagram alone, the results would be mixed at best. There are the celebrities shilling sketchy tea detoxes, all the sweaty post-workout selfies our friends post, and countless pretty, proportionate girls in an array of sizes posing in bikinis encouraging all of us, no matter our weight, to embrace our curves, to shun diets, to just love our bodies — and, by extension, ourselves —already.
Another thing that’s unavoidable: feeling less than unqualified joy about what you see in the mirror. “If you’re even a tiny bit of a critical person, there are always things that are wrong with everything. We have this notion of love that is connected to perfectionism — the image that we should be in bliss all the time is so strong in our culture,” says Joan Chrisler, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Connecticut College in New London.
Wanting to be fit isn’t antithetical to body neutrality, nor is dieting. “But it’s a tricky balance,” says Elena Ramirez, Ph.D., a clinical assistant professor of psychology at the University of Vermont in Burlington. “It’s reasonable, if someone is overweight, that they should lose weight. It’s all about moderation and being grounded in reality instead of avoiding the issue.
. “Neutrality is the freedom to go about your day without such a strong focus on your body,” says Kearney-Cooke. “We have only so much energy, where do we want to use it? There are lots of other things that need attention. You don’t want to neglect your body, so you listen to it, and are aware of the function it serves.”
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