ACE Fitness Gets Body Positivity And Balance All Wrong - Part 1

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The American Council on Exercise (ACE) is a non-profit that offers various fitness certifications. They have had a long history of diet culture and weight stigma, but have made some improvements lately, so I was hopeful when I saw the email “Best of ACE | Body Inclusivity. ” Sadly, this seems to be a serious backslide. What followed was an article called “Body Positivity - Finding a Balance” that is a co-option and attempted redefinition of the concepts of  “body positivity” and “weight-neutrality” seemingly in the service of weight stigma and diet culture.

I want to go through the piece bit by bit, the sections that are in italics and indented are quotes from the article itself that contain misrepresentations and weight stigma, you can skip them and still get the gist of the issues.

The concept of body positivity has gained significant traction, and rightly so. What is body positivity? It's a movement that champions self-love, acceptance and appreciation for bodies of all shapes, sizes and abilities. Isn’t this what we all want—to experience self-love, grant ourselves grace and practice gratitude for what our bodies can do? 

This is kind of accurate, though it should be clear that, while it’s an option, the gratitude does not have to be based on what our bodies can do.

At first glance, this movement is positive and necessary.

This…does not bode well. In truth, it’s positive and necessary at first glance, last glance, and every glance in between.

However, like any movement, it's important to strike a balance and avoid falling into the trap of extremes. In this article, we'll explore the importance of navigating the extremes of “weight focus” and “weight neutrality” to discover true harmony in our relationship with our bodies. 

This is the misinformation upon which the rest of the article rests. The idea that weight focus and weight neutrality are two extreme ends of a single spectrum is, either intentionally or due to the authors having been misinformed, completely false.

The Ditches of Extremes 

At one extreme, a focus on body weight alone is underscored by the pressure to conform to society's narrow standards of beauty. From airbrushed magazine covers to flawless social media #fitfluencers, we're bombarded with images of unattainable and unrealistic “perfection” at every turn. This constant barrage of unreasonable ideals can lead to feelings of inadequacy, low self-esteem and even disordered eating behaviors. The obsession with these idealized standards can take a toll on both physical and mental health. 

There are some interesting forces at play here. In order to support their buy-in to the weight-centric paradigm, which pathologizes higher weight bodies using terms like “ob*se” they have made up a category and definition that goes to great lengths not to include, or even mention, intentional weight loss attempts.

At the other extreme, we see the glorification of unhealthy habits under the guise of body positivity.

Wait…what? We’re going to take some time here because this is where the bulk of misinformation starts as they make up a definition for weight neutrality and then misuse it to prop up a co-option of “body positivity” that still clings to diet culture and anti-fatness.

Remember again the premise of the article is that “weight focus” and “weight neutrality” are two extremes on a spectrum.

But look how they have defined these two supposed extremes. The definition of “weight focus” that they made up is about an obsession with an unattainable standard of beauty. But the definition of “weight neutral” that they are making up is about "the glorification of unhealthy habits.”

Here the authors seem to be accidentally admitting that they conflate the concepts of socially constructed beauty standards (rooted in thin, white, cisgender, able-bodied youth) and “healthy habits” which is a serious problem and may explain a lot of the issues in this article.

For this idea of a spectrum of unhealthy obsession with beauty/weight at one end and glorification of unhealthy habits on the other to work, we would also have to believe that those who are focused on attaining narrow beauty standards (including thinness) DON’T participate in the glorification of unhealthy habits which three minutes of consuming TikTok beauty/health/weight loss influencer content will show you is plainly nonsense. (Even the authors admit that their made-up definition of “weight focus” can create disordered eating behaviors, though they stopped short of acknowledging full blown eating disorders and the many other harmful things people do in the pursuit of beauty, including and especially as defined by weight.)

We would also have to believe that “weight neutral” is about “glorifying unhealthy habits.”

First, “glorification” is a word that folks rooted in weight stigma like to throw around. We usually hear it when they complain that higher-weight people who refuse to be self-loathing and hyper-focused on becoming thin are “glorifying ob*sity.” In this article’s slightly sanitized version, those who take a weight-neutral approach participate in the “glorification of unhealthy habits.” Conveniently, they don’t define “glorification” or “unhealthy habits” leaving readers to rely on their own stereotypes and assumptions.

While I’m talking about this ACE article specifically today,I do want to point out that there are a lot of issues with the co-option of body positivity away from higher-weight people – in particular away from higher weight People of Color - by thinner, white influencers. You can listen to a discussion about it (there’s also a transcript) here and there is a paper about it here.

Remember that, earlier in the article, they (mostly) correctly defined body positivity as “a movement that champions self-love, acceptance and appreciation for bodies of all shapes, sizes and abilities.”

You’ll note that definition doesn’t say anything about healthy habits. That’s correct because, understanding that health is an amorphous concept and is not an obligation, barometer of worthiness, or entirely within our control, it is also not something upon which being positive about our bodies and believing that we are intrinsically valuable are contingent.

When someone tries to make “health,” or “healthy habits,” by whatever definition, a requirement of body positivity they are trying to drag this concept, kicking and screaming, into diet culture and toxic fitness culture.

In truth, loving/appreciating/being positive about our bodies is never an obligation, but it is an option and it stands fully apart from “health” or “healthy habits” by any definition.

This can manifest in the form of a mis-adaptation of the “health at every size” rhetoric that downplays the importance of healthy lifestyle choices under the guise of body acceptance.

The idea that these two authors have any expertise in the adaptation of Health at Every Size (mis- or otherwise) is called into question by that fact that they don’t acknowledge that HAES is the trademarked brand of the Association for Size Diversity and Health (ASDAH) and has a very specific principles and meaning, dictated by ASDAH and recently updated. It is not up for interpretation by these authors. The idea that correct adaptation would require people to engage in “healthy habits’ to deserve body positivity is not part of those principles.

How important “healthy lifestyle choices” are to any one person should only ever be based on the priorities and situation of an individual person, not on the opinion of the authors of a misguided article.

While it's crucial to embrace diversity and challenge harmful stereotypes, it's equally important to recognize a body of literature that ties disease risk to excess adiposity (i.e., body fat).

False. As we know, that body of literature is riddled with conflicts of interest (often funded and/or conducted by the weight loss industry) and methodological flaws, not the least of which is a failure to account for confounding variables including weight cycling, weight stigma (which this ACE article directly contributes to,) and healthcare inequalities, all of which are linked to very similar disease risk.

While seemingly contradictory, acknowledgment of ob*sity and its associated health risks doesn't necessarily contradict the principles of body positivity.

This is only “true” if the definition of body positivity is being manipulated in the service of anti-fatness and diet culture. This kind of paradigm straddling blunts the progress of those who have been doing true anti-weight stigma work, and co-opts it to the purposes of those who want to use it to continue to create a world that stigmatizes higher-weight people and promotes weight loss.

In part two we’ll look at the ways in which they work to re-define body positivity as something that can go hand in hand with anti-fat beliefs, as well as discussing how this all of this might have happened.

For now, if you are looking for accurate information about body positivity and weight-neutral fitness I highly recommend that Body Positive Fitness Alliance. Also canfitpro is doing strong work around this and has a list of resources here, note that I have not vetted all of the resources so please take care.

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More Research

For a full bank of research, check out https://haeshealthsheets.com/resources/

*Note on language: I use “fat” as a neutral descriptor as used by the fat activist community, I use “ob*se” and “overw*ight” to acknowledge that these are terms that were created to medicalize and pathologize fat bodies, with roots in racism and specifically anti-Blackness. Please read Sabrina Strings: Fearing the Black Body – the Racial Origins of Fat Phobia and Da’Shaun Harrison: Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness for more on this.