Most people by now have heard the message that we should stop criticizing our bodies and learn to love them instead. Body positivity has been around for many decades, challenging traditional beauty standards and the narrow idea that only certain bodies are worth celebrating.
Then the idea of body neutrality took some of the pressure off loving your body by suggesting you didn’t have to feel particularly good or bad about it. People could appreciate their bodies for what they do without making appearance such a big deal.
A phrase worth knowing is “body image flexibility.” It might sound like the latest addition to the body image conversation, but psychologists have actually been studying it for more than a decade.
The basic premise is slightly different. You don’t have to love how you look. You don’t have to feel neutral about it necessarily either. Body image flexibility allows negative thoughts and feelings about your body without immediately trying to change them. More importantly, those thoughts don’t have to determine what you do next.
What does “body image flexibility” look like?
Psychologist Diana Hill recently shared a few ways people can practice body image flexibility with NPR’s Life Kit. She offered four exercises for putting the idea into practice.
First, Hill suggests shifting attention away from how the body looks and toward what’s happening inside it. That can mean noticing breathing or physical sensations like hunger and tension.
Second, focus on what the body is doing rather than how it looks. Walking, hearing, and again, breathing are all examples.
Third, take a closer look at what’s behind concerns about a particular body part. Hill suggests noticing when they come up, the messages you’ve received about that body part, and how those feelings might be affecting your life.
Lastly, she recommends an “energy audit” by asking, “How much energy and time are you putting into obsessing about [your looks] in the mirror versus engaging in your life and the things you care about?”
These exercises don’t require someone to change how they feel about their appearance. They’re ways of changing how much attention those feelings get and what happens because of them.
Body image flexibility isn’t as new as it sounds
Body image flexibility may not be as familiar as body positivity or body neutrality, but researchers have been studying it for years. By 2021, there were enough studies for a meta-analysis of 62 of them. Greater body image flexibility was associated with fewer eating and body-image disturbances and lower levels of psychological distress.
A 2026 study followed hundreds of adults for eight months and found similar associations. The relationship also appeared to go both ways. Greater body image flexibility was associated with less disordered eating, eating-related impairment, and psychological distress later on. People experiencing more of those problems at the beginning also tended to have less body image flexibility eight months later.
Does body image flexibility replace body positivity?
Embracing body image flexibility doesn’t necessarily mean body positivity or body neutrality are now going away. There is overlap between the three approaches. The main difference with flexibility is that there isn’t a particular feeling about your body you’re trying to reach. Someone can like how they look one day, dislike it the next, and not think much about it at all the day after that.
What matters more is what happens because of those feelings. That’s where Hill brings the idea back to how people spend their time and attention.
“Every little bit of energy you’re putting into sucking in your stomach or [feeling] distracted by your shiny face pulls away energy from you,” Hill said.
