Body positivity and body doubts: what Susie Orbach teaches us

What Susie Orbach understood about body doubts

Does this sound familiar?

You stand in front of the mirror and the first thing you see is what bothers you. The belly. The thighs. The lines that weren't there yesterday. And somewhere in your head, a quiet commentary runs along – rarely a kind one.

Most of us know this voice. It has become so ordinary that we hardly question it anymore.

Even body positivity – the movement that set out to quiet exactly this voice – has not silenced it for many of us.

That is exactly what Susie Orbach did – and she did it twice.

«Fat is a Feminist Issue»: what the body carries for us

In 1978, the British psychotherapist wrote a book whose title still provokes today. Her thesis was simple and radical at the same time: when so many women fight their own bodies, it is not an individual failure. It says something about the world they live in.

Orbach did not ask: How do I get thinner?
She asked: What does my body mean to me? What am I expressing through it?

Sometimes the body is protection. Sometimes protest. Sometimes the only place where we feel we have something under control.

Once you understand this, you realise: diets often don't fail for lack of willpower. They fail because they start in the wrong place.

«Bodies»: the body as a never-ending project

Thirty years later, Orbach went a step further in «Bodies». Her observation: for many people, the body has become a project. Something to be optimised, shaped and improved – for a lifetime.

I explore how deeply this pressure to optimise shapes us in my post Self-optimization: the right to become someone else.

And she shows how early this begins. Our sense of our own body does not arise in the mirror, but in relationships. In how we were held, looked at and commented on as children. And in how the adults around us treated their own bodies.

Body insecurity is passed on. Quietly, casually, often with the best of intentions.

Body positivity: between «love yourself» and self-optimisation

Today we find ourselves caught between two messages.

One says: Love your body just as it is.
The other says: Here are ten tips for a flatter stomach.

Body positivity has achieved a great deal. It has made visible bodies that were hidden for a long time, and it has named shame.

But for someone who struggles with their body, the phrase «love yourself» can feel like yet another task to fail at.

Body neutrality: the body as a home

Maybe it doesn't have to be love at all.

Maybe a lot would already be gained if the body no longer had to be judged all the time. If it were not a project, but a home. This attitude is called body neutrality.

What can actually help

Not as a recipe, but as an invitation:

• Notice the inner voice. Don't change it right away – just notice it. Whose voice is it, really? Does it sound like me – or like someone from the past?
• Ask what your body does, not only how it looks. What did it carry, move, feel and enjoy today?
• Listen to hunger and fullness rather than to rules from outside. Orbach suggested exactly this almost fifty years ago.
• Compare less. You can unfollow on social media, too.
• Check how you talk about bodies. About your own and about other people's.

What we pass on

Children don't learn from our words, but from our behaviour. They hear how we talk about ourselves in front of the mirror and how we comment on other people's bodies.

Perhaps this is the most important insight from both books: how we treat our bodies never concerns only ourselves.

In closing

Doubts about our own bodies rarely disappear overnight. But they can grow quieter.

Not by finally finding ourselves beautiful.
But by no longer constantly judging ourselves.

Literature

• Susie Orbach: Fat is a Feminist Issue, 1978
• Susie Orbach: Bodies, 2009

If thoughts about food and your body are dominating your everyday life, it is worth talking to a professional – in Switzerland, for example, through the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Ess-Störungen (AES).