Do You Live in a Body Positive State… Literally?
Body positivity isn’t just Pinterest inspo or a body positive celebrity Instagram trend. A recent study shows that feeling good about your weight and how you look directly correlates to your overall sense of satisfaction with life. Whoa. And as more body positive bloggers and social media stars cross over into the mainstream, it seems the rest of the world — including the fashion industry (hello Tess Holliday) — is finally starting to catch on.
If you feel like you’re seeing the #bodypositive and #selflove hashtags on a lot more Instagram posts lately, one of the reasons may be that you live in a super body positive state. The website bulimia.com, dedicated to empowering eating disorder sufferers and encouraging healthy body images, analyzed how people across the country post about positive body image on social media. The study analyzed posts on Instagram, chosen for its visual media and community-driven hashtags, and looked at not only how many posts were being made in each state, but also the sentiment (re: love/hate) attached to the images.
So how does your state shape up? Well, if you live in Oregon, congrats — your state has embraced body positivity more than any other, by far! Utah, Nevada, New York and California weren’t too far behind on having tons of residents who love their bodies — and flaunt their self-love on Insta. On the other hand, North Dakota, West Virginia, Iowa, Montana and New Mexico have some work to do on accepting bodies of all shapes and sizes.
If you want to spread the movement in your state (or start it — looking at you, North Dakota), the study also tracked the most commonly used hashtags, including #effyourbeautystandards (the most-used, popularized by plus-size model Tess Holliday), #bodypositive, #celebratemysize and #honormycurves — plus some of our snarky favorites — #imnoangel and #andigetdressed.
To track sentiment, bulimia.com used an analysis tool called Textblob, which takes a look at the words and scores based on positivity. The hashtag #fatgirls had the overall highest sentiment score, which shows how ‘grammers have successfully subverted the “fat” insult. Yass, ladies! Oregon and Vermont had the highest scores for overall levels of positive posts.
The fact that the body positive movement is growing on social media is huge, but loving yourself can still be a daily struggle. Remember to show yourself compassion every day. It’s key to looking and (more importantly) feeling your best.
How do you define body positivity? Show us on Instagram!
(Photos via bulimia.com and Getty)