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If you look up "body positivity," you'll get a dozen different definitions. Here's mine, built from eight years of running a plus-size brand and a body that has changed more times than I can count: body positivity is loving your body through every season and change.

Not just when it looks a certain way. Not just on the good days. Through every version of yourself your body becomes.

What body positivity actually means

Body positivity started as a movement built by and for fat, disabled, and marginalized people who were tired of being told their bodies were problems to fix. At its core, it's simple: your body is not up for debate. It doesn't have to earn love by shrinking, toning, or transforming into something else first.

That's the whole idea behind My Beautiful Fluff. I didn't start this brand because I'd figured out how to love my body perfectly. I started it because I was tired of waiting to find clothes, representation, and community until I did.

Body positivity vs. body neutrality

This is a real conversation in this space, and I don't think the two are opposites the way people sometimes frame them.

Body neutrality is accepting your body without needing to love it in any given moment — focusing on what it does rather than how it looks. Body positivity is choosing to actively celebrate your body, not just tolerate it.

Living with fibromyalgia and rheumatoid arthritis taught me why both matter. Some days, loving my body isn't available to me. My body hurts, it's slower than it used to be, and "positivity" would feel like a performance I don't have the energy for. On those days, neutrality is the honest, sustainable choice — not fighting my body, not hating it, just letting it be what it is that day.

But neutrality alone isn't where I want to live. Body positivity is the practice I return to on the days I have more room — actively choosing to celebrate a body that has carried me through diagnosis, through building a business from nothing, through every season it's been in. That's what "loving your body through every change" means to me. It's not a fixed state. It's a practice you come back to, season after season, version after version of yourself.

Why representation is part of the practice

You can't practice loving a body you never see reflected back at you. That's the piece that's easy to leave out of body positivity conversations that stay purely internal — representation is part of the practice, not separate from it.

When I went looking for a plus-size natural-hair-celebration tee years ago and couldn't find one past a 3X, that absence was its own message. Body positivity, for me, has always included the external work — building the representation I couldn't find — alongside the internal work of actually believing it.

Body positivity is a practice, not a destination

If you're waiting to feel done with the work before you count as body positive, you'll be waiting a long time. I've run this brand for eight years and I still have hard days with my body. That doesn't disqualify me from the practice — it's the practice.

Love your body through this season. Then the next one. Then whatever comes after that.