Every morning, my mother rose from bed and walked straight to her bathroom where this cold metal plate on the ground lied awaiting the bare skin of her feet to meet its face. A few moments would pass and these bold black numbers would blink back at her.  I now know that feeling, the one where you think the numbers are taunting you, as they unintentionally define your worth. She would stare at the numbers more disappointed than the morning before then lift her feet from the metal’s face.

Every once and awhile these mornings would ignite change in the family’s meal plans. They would go from warm colorful platters, to cold plates that gave false promises of flavor, to separate meals that were prepared for herself and the rest of the family. I watched as her portions grew smaller and smaller, along with her confidence. True sympathy and understanding for what my mother was feeling did not arise in me until one day when my doctor announced that my weight was getting substantially low, and was lowering at a concerning rate. Upon hearing this my mother, who has the unique ability to create comedic relief even in the most stressful of situations, would joke that I must be gifting her my pounds for whatever I lost, she seemed to gain.

My mother and I are different in our struggles, but our stories are eerily similar. Progressing through my adolescence and my anorexic struggles I, like many others, have stumbled upon the social body positivity wave, the one that’s been breaking barriers like never before. But recently, I have learned, that as a society, we are failing. The movement encourages health and well-being while displaying a more forgiving attitude to your body regardless of the state it's currently in. People are either actively exercising and dieting in the hopes of shedding a few pounds, or they do the exact opposite by simply changing nothing and  acknowledging the way they look. At first glance this seems harmless; however, personal health is usually ignored. Kelly deVos from the New York Times states,

“Many people in the body positivity movement  believe that the desire to lose weight is never legitimate, because it is an expression of the psychological toll of fat shaming. So any public discussion of personal health or body size constitutes fat shaming.”

She continues by saying, “The problem with today’s version of body positivity is that it refuses to acknowledge that no one approach is right for every person. One teenager might grow up to be healthy at any weight, and another might end up in the hospital.”

The movement, perceived to be a positive force, is not focused on how amazing it feels to be intelligent, strong, powerful and creative, but rather, it is strictly promoting that we are good-looking at any weight. It is simply highlighting appearance and not the physical and emotional strength that comes with good health.  

When we take a moment to view people’s body positive posts that they share online, we see when learning to love yourself,  it is a journey. But more often than not, it is a journey that goes to the extremes. The body positivity movement is supposed to be about celebrating the way people look no matter what, yet the only body type that I repeatedly see being celebrated is at the far end of the weight spectrum. There are never the super skinny, the super muscular, the super short, nor the taller than average people. The movement is fixated on one body type, but promotes the idea of celebrating all.

Another issue that is found, and is continuously ignored, within this push for positivity, is the fact that this movement is yet another dangerous fascination with women's appearance and not women's overall well-being. The simple fact is, we are still managing to hurt ourselves through our obsessive focus on body image, regardless of how it is presented. We tend to weigh ourselves not to check on our health, but rather to see a number, one which we never seem to be satisfied with. It is fair to say that we need to be changing the focus from our appearance to our capabilities, our intelligence, our productivity, and our ability to connect and love. Writer Lisa Kaplin shares that,

"Ultimately, our strength, our joy, and our personal happiness will not and should not be tied to our appearance. It must be tied to our comfort in our own skin, our health, our accomplishments and our relationships."

We continue to evaluate things that we know at our cores, is different for every person. If our goal is simply to look in the mirror and be happy with what we see then perhaps we have succeeded, but as author Ann Voskamp states, “Scales always lie. They don't make a scale that ever told the truth about value, about worth, about significance.”  

The movement claims to want to stop society from judging women based on the number on the scale, and empower ladies of all shapes and sizes to feel great at whatever weight they are; however, much like the scale my mother chooses to step on each morning, this movement is just another flawed solution of how we handle our size and the sizes of others, it is a movement that continues to abuse the  mentalities of individuals.We are a society of growing intelligence yet we can not manage to learn that beauty has nothing to do with a person’s value. Woman still over indulge in unhealthy foods, girls still starve themselves, and my mother, the smartest woman I know, still drags her feet over a metal face that delivers a bold numerical method of torture letting it define her worth, day in, and day out.