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“I used to cry in the parking lot before spin class,” recalls Darnell, 41, a teacher in Atlanta. “I was the biggest person there. I thought everyone was judging me. But then I found a queer, body-inclusive strongman gym. We lift atlas stones. We flip tires. No one talks about calories. We talk about ‘heavy shit makes me feel powerful.’”

But a new, more nuanced conversation is emerging from the wreckage of the 2010s "clean eating" era and the backlash against toxic Instagram fitness. The question is no longer whether you can love your body and want to change it. The question is how . To understand the tension, you have to look at the wounds. The original body positivity movement, born from the fat acceptance activism of the 1960s, was a social justice crusade against systemic weight discrimination. But by the 2020s, it had been diluted into a commercialized slogan. miss teen nudist year junior miss pageant

“It used to be that you were either healthy or sick,” says Dr. Kessley Jamison, a clinical psychologist specializing in eating disorders. “Now, you are ‘optimal’ or ‘negligent.’ Wellness brands started selling the idea that if you aren’t bio-hacking, cold-plunging, and eating grass-fed liver, you are failing at existence.” “I used to cry in the parking lot

For years, these two philosophies have circled each other like wary boxers. Body positivity accuses wellness of being diet culture in athleisure clothing. Wellness accuses body positivity of promoting complacency in the face of preventable disease. But then I found a queer, body-inclusive strongman gym

“You have to decouple health from weight,” says nutritionist Elena Zhou, author of The Gentle Nutrition Approach . “You can eat more vegetables because you love yourself and want to feel energetic, not because you hate your belly. That sounds simple. But it is the hardest psychological shift a person can make.”