Weight Watchers is celebrating 11 women who posed nude for their magazine’s May/June cover story titled ‘I Am Beautiful.’ Even If you disagree with them making all of the photos nude instead of showing of their bodies with clothes on, you have to be please to see they didn’t retouch the photos at all.
The women look incredible—and most important, they’re spreading the news of body positivity in a world where categorizing a woman based on a her size is too common and a hurtful experience. One of the women Latoya admitted to People, “I used to be afraid, very afraid, all the time. I’d be afraid that when someone hugged me, they’d feel the fat on my body. I’d be afraid when I heard someone call me Miss Piggy because I realized that that nickname was a way to call me chubby without saying it. I’ve put a positive spin on that: Miss Piggy is confident, sassy, and fabulous. Go ahead, call me by that name: that’s, finally, a compliment.”
In an interview with AdWeek, Editor Theresa DiMasi of Weight Watchers talked about the importance of walking the talk had to start with this cover. “For women, this negative body talk keeps coming up over and over. But one of the things that happens in Weight Watchers is that, along your journey, you start accepting yourself. You start talking about yourself positively,” said DiMasi. And what better way to preach body acceptance before dieting, than show off women’s bodies?
Obviously these women are beautiful no matter what number they see on the scale, body positivity isn’t about diet and exercise; it’s about women feeling sexy and good in their own skin. And that’s something you can’t even be mad about. Cheers to Weight Watchers. Even if it is a company built on women who want to lose weight together, they’ve been celebrating non-scale victories and these unretouched photos are definitely a step in the right direction.