Canadian fitness coach Scott Abel on the Catch-22 of the beauty doctrine myth:
When you diet to gain “acceptance” for becoming closer to an ideal standard of female size and beauty, you are already buying into a system that says you are unacceptable the way you are. Hence, the acceptance you seek by losing weight etc never ever really “feels” like true “acceptance,” because it’s not. What it really is, is “approval” for NOT being yourself. And then you gain the weight back and look for acceptance in all the wrong places all over again. SELF-acceptance is the answer – AND it’s the process – AND it’s the solution. Anything less, will feel like you are motivated by a fraud – because you will be. “approval” and “acceptance” are not even close to being the same thing.
This is one of the reasons I’m worried about things getting worse before they get better. When you get to my age (an old lady wearing purple), this pressure lessons considerably. But that’s a long time to wait for my nieces, my cousins’ kids, and so many others, where the need to be accepted results in some scary activities, like paying attention to things like thigh gap.
OTOH, I’m encouraged by pockets of acceptance like Go Kaleo’s Eating the Food. The 3K+ members of the ETF Facebook group still struggle with ingrained ‘approval’ needs, but the community is there to help.
Now how to scale this … hmmm.
Weight Maven is written by Beth Mazur. Beth believes that obesity is more symptom than cause and that the real problem is our Western diet -- especially sugar, refined grains, and industrial oils. Beth writes about nutrition, ancestral health, & food policy. And cats! 
Thank goodness the pressure lessens with age. I was done with lusting after imagery in the media by my early to mid-20′s. I think that working behind the scenes (seeing and participating in what goes on in photoshop) made me realize that what’s displayed to the general public are no longer photographs, but more like photo illustrations.
A decade later I’m happy for the freedom from that misery that was trying to compare myself to caricatures of random women. I have a young daughter and I hope that I can show her by example that health comes first and the rest is nonsense. She’ll know that thigh gap is a bunch of baloney because hips, thighs and butts is where women store DHA, a valuable nutrient for her own brain and for her offspring :)
I think that loving ourselves is appreciating our bodies for their strength and all that we can accomplish with them. This leads to self-care and improved health/maintenance of good health and *that* is beautiful.
Oh dear, Beth. I run into this all the time! Yes, there are some fashion/style related pieces of the obesity issue — the “what other people think” stuff. But it is not the whole story, and the answer, for me, was not to accept myself as a 365-pounder! Regardless of what other people thought (and no, of course it wasn’t nice), that was not good for me.
I do agree on the need for self-acceptance, but it involves a paradox that I address daily in prayer: “Please help me to accept myself as I am, even as I try to get better a day at a time.” Why would I need to get any better, if I accept where I am? But both are fruitful goals, in my experience.
I just find it so irksome that advocates urge acceptance of ones’ current condition, even if it is unhealthful, just because other people can be mean.
Michael, that’s not how I read this quote … after all, the writer is a *fitness* coach … not a fat acceptance or even HAES activist.