It’s not about loving or hating how your body looks but about accepting and respecting what it can do – even if it isn’t the way you wish it would be.
When I had a baby last summer — my first, a healthy boy — I knew that my body would be in rough shape afterward. Or, as my mother put it when I gingerly tried on a new pair of sweatpants one week post-birth: “Nothing is going to look good for a while. Try not to worry about it.”
Instead of testing out her theory, I took slow, sunny walks with my baby napping in his stroller. I wasn’t exactly reveling in my loose skin, but I wasn’t bothered by it either. To my surprise, I didn’t care much about it at all.There’s a name for this concept: Body neutrality, or the ability to accept and respect your body even if it isn’t the way you’d prefer it to be.
Body neutrality might also appeal to those who find the warts-and-all approach of body positivity to be a bit, well, contrived.
Lauren Leavell, a personal trainer and founder of the Leavell Up Fitness platform, characterises body neutrality as “a perspective shift that can bring about more realistic goal setting”.