One key example of this is the position that the reality television family the Kardashians has taken on body positivity. Kim Kardashian and her family are often seen touting body-positive ideas on social media, such as encouraging their followers to embrace their curves. Unfortunately, they also promote products like appetite-suppressing supplements and shapewear, which seem to contradict those love yourself as you are posts and instead promote unrealistic beauty standards. There's also the issue of how body positivity can spur toxic positivity, leaving many people battling with their negative emotions and feelings of low self-worth on a quieter scale. Because body positivity advocates for loving your body no matter what, it can cause some people to bury their negative feelings about themselves, rather than dealing with them in a healthy way. Unfortunately, suppressing your emotions isn't always a helpful behavior: in fact, one study found that it can actively hurt your health. Case in point: a different study found that positive self-statements really helped people who already had high self-esteem and actually believed those statements, but made people with lower self-esteem feel worse since they didn't actually believe in what they were saying. In other words, the pressure to stay positive still places a huge amount of pressure on your body image, and repressing your negative emotions in an effort to love yourself at all times is not only unrealistic but harmful, in some cases. Finally, the fine line between body positivity and health deserves a mention. While body positivity can have a beneficial effect on how people view themselves, it can also leave medical professionals struggling to address the real issues that may result from some dietary and lifestyle choices.

Some critics of the body positivity movement fear that the increasing acceptance and normalization of bigger bodies may mask the potential health consequences that can come with higher body weights. This doesn't necessarily mean that having a larger body type than societal beauty standards dictate is automatically going to be a detriment to your health. Your risk of health issues and comorbidities is highly individualized. They can change depending on whether you're classified as moderately overweight or obese on the Body Mass Index (BMI) scale, with your risks generally increasing as your BMI does. Interestingly, there's also evidence that excess weight can affect people of different ethnicities differently. For example, one study found that Black women lost fewer years of life with increasing BMI than white women did, highlighting the importance of viewing health through a bigger lens than body weight alone. It's also worth noting that many misogynistic and fatphobic people use insincere arguments to mask their hatred of larger people. Saying "I'm just worried about their health!" is often a subtle means of criticizing people who don't fit the thin ideal, a tactic known as "concern trolling." Most concern trolls don't actually care about the health of the people they're criticizing – they're merely using this argument as a tool to cloak their discomfort with bigger bodies. Ultimately, it's simplistic to conclude that being overweight automatically equals being unhealthy, and it's up to health professionals (and not Internet trolls) to lead discussions about weight and wellbeing.

As opposed to body positivity, which encourages people to feel beautiful and confident at any size, body neutrality advocates for completely eliminating physical appearance as part of a person's self-worth. It recommends you focus more on how you feel in your body and what your body can do, rather than what your body looks like at any given time. 2-1. The origins of body neutrality: The idea of body neutrality is fairly new, especially when compared to the long-standing history of body positivity in all of its various iterations over the years. The concept of "body neutrality" really started to take off around 2016 and is often credited to Anne Poirier, a body image coach who started the Body Neutrality Workshop in 2015. Body neutrality has become a huge part of the body image conversation since, with celebrities like Jameela Jamil and Taylor Swift reportedly celebrating body neutrality rather than body positivity. Why body neutrality may help you One of the best perks of practicing body neutrality is that it takes away much of the pressure that many people feel when it comes to their body image. Again, while the idea of feeling positive about your body at any size is generally a good one, it still places a huge amount of attention and focus on physical appearance, and in many ways may still objectify people and relate their feelings of self-worth to their physique (albeit in a different way than conventional beauty standards might). So in some cases, body neutrality, which eliminates your appearance from your self-worth "calculation" completely, might be a better fit for you.