If you have adopted body positivity this year, it may help to send a letter to your family to share your new lifestyle in advance of any holiday gatherings. Many families participate in diet and fitness conversations and actively and passively promote the “ideal body.” They may perpetuate the myth that weight can and should be controlled through restrictive eating and over-exercise.
Getting out of the habit of talking about diets and weight can be hard for even the most enlightened family. This letter is designed to help you share your body positivity journey with your extended family during the holidays.
Letter to family about body positivity
Dear Family,
I’m looking forward to seeing you next week for Christmas! In the past year, our family has, for various reasons, embraced a body-positive approach to health. I wanted to tell you a little more about this in advance of the Christmas party so you’re aware of what’s going on with us.
What is body positivity?
Body positivity has a lot of definitions, but our family defines it as having positive regard for all bodies. This means we respect bodies of all shapes, sizes, and weights. We embrace the truth that bodies come in all sizes and honor people for who they are, not for what they look like. Additionally, we don’t judge people negatively for having a larger body or positively for having a smaller body. We believe that all bodies deserve respect.
As a family, we also have learned about Intuitive Eating, which is a way of approaching health that has nothing to do with weight. With Intuitive Eating, we have learned to nourish our bodies, giving them what they need with joy and compassion. It’s been quite a change from our previous approach of dieting and exercising to meet specific weight goals.
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Why is body positivity important?
Body positivity is an anti-discrimination stance. It’s founded on the belief that all people deserve respect and dignity regardless of their body’s appearance, health status, or ability. For too long our society has ostracized, blamed, and criticized people who fall outside of very narrow body ideals, and adopting body positivity fits our social and political beliefs because it is inclusive and anti-discrimination.
Aside from lofty ideals, body positivity is also protective against anxiety, depression, suicidality, eating disorders, and other mental and emotional disorders. And – get this – it’s also healthier! People who are body-positive have better health outcomes than people who pursue specific weight goals and body ideals. So in addition to our political beliefs, body positivity is also something we’re doing for the health of each individual in our family.
What does it mean to have a body-positive approach to health?
For us, a body-positive approach to health means that we care for our bodies. We move them, rest them, enjoy them, and feed them. We invest in a whole-body approach to health. The only thing we don’t do is try to contort our bodies into a different weight, size, or shape.
We have gotten rid of our scales and no longer use weight as a measure of health (because it’s not!). We’re not insisting on a sugar-free lifestyle or rigid exercise plans anymore. We’re all enjoying all foods and eating according to our hunger and appetite rather than diet programs. This is incredibly freeing and has positively impacted each of us. We all feel better than ever now that we approach our health from a place of love and acceptance rather than domination and control.
Why are we doing body positivity?
We discovered body positivity earlier this year and have been working on it as a family. Our main goals are twofold. First, body positivity matches our social justice goals as a family. Secondly, body positivity is great for our mental and physical health!
The truth is that all of us were suffering in different ways under our previous lifestyle. While everything we did looked and seemed like it was healthy, the dark truth is that we weren’t actually taking care of ourselves very well. We recognized that something had to change, and when we discovered body-positivity we recognized that it was a massive change in some ways, but ultimately it fits our values much better than the dieting and restricting we did before.
How body positivity impacts our family
The main thing we’ve learned on this journey is to not judge anyone’s health based on their weight and to stop labeling food as good or bad. It’s all too common to carry unconscious biases about health in our culture. And we’re all influenced by the diet industry that tells us we need to weigh less and eat this/not that, etc.
Freed from this restrictive view of bodies and health, we now find ourselves identifying how we each feel within our bodies. Now we treat them with the ultimate respect and love they deserve.
We no longer judge food based on its caloric content or nutritional value. Instead, we seek a varied diet that tastes good and sustains us. Also, we got rid of our scale and have all discovered that not weighing ourselves has taken a huge weight (🤣 haha – couldn’t resist) off our shoulders.
Of course, we still live in a culture that is critical of bodies, but we’re glad that in our home, bodies are respected and loved exactly as they are.
What this means for you
Of course, this doesn’t have to mean anything to you! But our family gatherings often involve some diet talk and discussion about other people’s and our own weight. So I wanted to give you a heads-up that we’re not going to be participating in those conversations anymore. I know this could be awkward at first. It’s always hard when families change. But please know that we love you very much. And we know that there is so much more we can talk about than weight and nutrition.
I’m happy to talk to you some more about this if you want to learn more. I look forward to seeing you next week!
Love, me
Holidays with an eating disorder in the family can be challenging, but I wish you the very best holiday possible for you and your family! xoxo
Ginny Jones is the founder of More-Love.org, and a Parent Coach who helps parents who have kids with disordered eating and eating disorders. Combining science, compassion, and experience coaching hundreds of families, she helps parents understand what’s going on with their kids’ eating behaviors and teaches them the science-backed skills to heal kids’ relationship with food, improve their body image, and feel better about themselves, their relationships, and life in general.
Ginny has been researching and writing about eating disorders since 2016. She incorporates the principles of neurobiology and attachment parenting with a non-diet, Health At Every Size® approach to health and recovery.