I’ve been having an interesting conversation on Twitter with a woman who advocates for size acceptance.
I shared with her that I believe in size acceptance, but that my experience in over 30 years of being a dietitian has been that it hasn’t seemed to help progress the movement to confront it directly. In fact, many popular women’s magazines I’ve seen, tend to politely give lip service to the idea by putting an article in about the topic. At which point, I see it posted by the author on Facebook, all of that person’s friends “like” the post, they get a moment of fame for the piece, and traffic is driven to the magazine’s website. Where everywhere you look there are advertisements and other articles with messages running completely counter to the well-intended message in the “healthy” article.
The magazines don’t care what’s in the article. They want hits, because hits determine advertising rates. If baiting and switching the size acceptance crew to keep them coming back… keeps them coming back, and they read the counterproductive ads, then it’s highly possible that continuing to agree to participate in this vicious cycle only keeps those who feel victimized by the whole media/body image disconnect… further entrapped.
I’m a realist. We live in a country that is based on the right to freedom of speech. The very freedom I have to write this blog post is the same one the magazine publishers have. They really don’t care about my self-esteem, or your self-esteem, at all. They care about keeping their stockholders happy. Getting people to visit your website, regardless of how you make it happen, to keep advertisers happy, to keep ad rates up, to create the bottom line that keeps those stockholders happy… is all that matters to any media entity.
So while I applaud the efforts of my friends who work in size acceptance, I have come to believe that the approach they’ve been taking is quite possibly having the opposite effect.
That is why, several years ago, I dropped out of the eating disorder conference circuit. I stopped participating in the dialogue. I kept hearing the same old dialogue, over and over and over, but it always stopped with “dialogue”. No action plans were coming out of that dialogue, no progress was made in the success rates for treating ANY eating disorder… it just wasn’t making a difference. I wanted to make a genuine difference.
What the women advocating for size acceptance want, those creating the dialogue want… is validation. And they seem to desperately want it from an industry, that quite realistically, doesn’t care about validation. Quite the opposite. They want women to feel BADLY about themselves. Because if they were quite satisfied with their looks, they would not respond to any of the advertisements that keep THEIR stockholders happy, which wouldn’t line the pockets of the companies producing the products who also have stockholders to answer to.
One side of the issue wants dialogue and validation, the other wants money. That is never going to change.
So when I dropped out of the dialogue and went on to create this inCYST network, what I envisioned was that we would create a warm, safe, nourishing community where we could learn to be healthy. We wouldn’t stomp and scream and hold our breath and not do anything for ourselves until the world was perfect, we’d create a perfect world for ourselves. That is why, for the most part, on this blog, even though the majority of the audience we work with has body image issues, history of an eating disorder, and/or weight issues, we don’t really talk about it very much. Talking about it only focuses you on the feeling that you’re being victimized. We’d rather empower you out of that tree.
I care very much about how each and every one of you feels about yourself. But I am not interested in dialogue that focuses you on what someone else is or is not doing. I don’t want to talk about the thing you’re trying to evolve away from. I want to know what you’ve done today. To manage your stress. To eat more folate. To delegate. To move your body.
Let’s imagine for a moment that when we wake up tomorrow, overnight I was given a superpower that allowed me to reinvent the entire media industry. Internet, Facebook, television, Twitter, newspapers, magazines… everything And let’s imagine that I used that super power to reinvent all of those things so that the only messages that could be communicated, anywhere, were positive, nurturing, and reinforcing.
Would you be able to live in that world? Would you be able to have a conversation with someone if you couldn’t talk about body image? If you weren’t spending significant amounts of time reading destructive magazines, following unproductive Twitter personalities, having dialogue about what’s wrong with the world? Would you be able to fill your day with self-nurturing activities? Would you eat better? Would you be happier?
Or would you be totally at a loss for what to do with yourself?
I don’t have that super power, but I aspire to create that kind of world. Last week I sent a thank you note to someone who made a purchase out of our new eMarket. She thanked us for having a place for her to shop where she felt heard and validated. And she also gave me a long list of suggestions for things we could do to expand on that world. I was happy to be able to ask her to “hold that thought” because most of those ideas were already on the drawing board.
I actually don’t want to have that kind of superpower. Because that wouldn’t be very empowering to YOU. I want YOU to take action. To stop looking at those magazines in the grocery store. To stop walking past the healthy salad bar and walking into the fried chicken joint. I want inCYST to be an underground of sorts, of women who have decided they don’t have to be victims anymore.
And who understand that one of the most powerful ways to speak, is with their wallets. If you’re not buying the magazines, not clicking on the websites, you are having a much greater effect on those media corporations than you are with dialogue.
I hope you choose to patronize the companies offering products in our eMarket, because if we can help these companies with great ideas as well as integrity to succeed, they are validated financially and can have the opportunity to become advertisers with power who actually have some influence over the media.
And the bottom line is, I want us to use our community to learn how to live in a world whether or not the media influences do exist. They only have a negative influence on you if you allow them to, and clicking on links and buying magazines opens the door to that path. Not going there is going to mean being more introspective, and talking about things like what you think how you feel, what you aspire to… what your talents are, what action you’re going to take… but for me, that is the dialogue that inspires me.
That world can exist right here, you know. Which is why I don’t participate in the dialogue about media. There are only so many hours in the day and any minute I spend on a fruit less effort is a moment that I’ve wasted because I didn’t use it focusing on YOU and who you are and how we can make inCYST world a place thtat celebrates who you are.
I know it sounds a little weird to some of you who are used to identifying yourself or introducing yourself as afat person or a former fat person or an infertile person,… or other limiting labels. I want to challenge you to, every day, if even for 15 minutes to start with, see how it feels to stop using labels to define yourself. Labels that keep you in a position of disempowerment. Labels that keep you stuck right where all those media companies want you. You might be surprised at how limiting your current labels actually turn out to be.
I want to create a new world and a new econmy with you, supported by health professionals and companies who see your beauty and your talent and who really would like to do business with you. Of course, they have stockholders too. But when they can go back to those stockholders and report that they succeeded with a product that was hard to get on the market because they took a risk on a product they were told didn’t have broad enough appeal… they teach those stockholders to seek out other small companies with big visions.
It’s a trickle up effect. I can offer you options, but it starts with you. And your decision to not focus on what the “bad” guys are doing, but to find those good guys who can help you feel good about yourself.
It’s still dialogue, it’s just dialogue with action plans attached. And from what I can see with who’s buying in our store and the energy it’s creating, it confirms to me that my better action here is to not talk about body image and self-esteem. But rather to encourage those very things with actions.
If you are a solution-focused person ready to take action, inCYST is designed for you. If you're into dialogue it may not be a great fit. If the dialoguing eventually moves you to a place where you're ready to take action…come join our fan page, come to a fundraiser, come to a class at our new office in Santa Monica, work with one of our network members to create change in your life, or simply read our posts and try a suggestion from time to time.
We like to think if you hang around us long enough, you'll start to feel like hanging out on the same old site with the same old ads and articles, Tweeting the same thoughts to the same people, is going to feel a lot less rewarding than what we have going on here. Our network stretches from New Hampshire to Florida to San Francisco to Seattle. Wherever we are, we're pretty great and we have a lot of fun. We look forward to seeing you somewhere, sometime soon. No magazines allowed.: )