For too long, and despite what people told me, I had fallen for what the culture said about beauty, youth, features, heights, weights, hair textures, upper arms.

[Women’s magazines]ignore older women or pretend that they don’t exist; magazines try to avoid photographs of older women, and when they feature celebrities who are over sixty, ‘retouching artists’ conspire to ‘help’ beautiful women look...

The articles were extremely eye-opening. Not just in Teen Vogue but in Seventeen and CosmoGirl as well. They were all about being yourself, staying natural, loving your body as is, and going green! The messages...

Women could probably be trained quite easily to see men first as sexual things. If girls never experienced sexual violence; if a girl’s only window on male sexuality were a stream of easily available, well-lit,...

Since middle-class Western women can best be weakened psychologically now that we are stronger materially, the beauty myth, as it has resurfaced in the last generation, has had to draw on more technological sophistication and...

HOW do you define a word without concrete meaning? To each his own, the saying goes, soWHYpush to attain an ideal state of being that no two random people will agree isWHERE you want to...

…compulsive eating is basically a refusal to be fully alive. No matter what we weigh, those of us who are compulsive eaters have anorexia of the soul. We refuse to take in what sustains us....

My dad will win, I silently countered, even as I smiled sweetly. I couldn’t wait to spike the ball right through her block, no matter how tall she was. In health class we’d learned that...

Young women today feel vulnerable to judgment; if a harsh sentence is passed (or even suspected or projected), it is not her reputation that suffers so much as the stability of her moral universe. They...

I hope so. But I meant me. I’m beautiful to me.

Like all living things, you were created for unlimited growth and possibilities. Keep growing. Keep changing. Be everything you were meant to be.

We clean our plates, yet we’re still famished—starving for something other than food.

Women who love themselves are threatening; but men who love real women, more so.

She may resent Playboy because she resents feeling ugly in sex–or, if “beautiful,” her body defined and diminished by pornography. It inhibits in her something she needs to live, and gives her the ultimate anaphrodisiac:...

By choosing healthy over skinny you are choosing self-love over self-judgment. You are beautiful!

You are imperfect, permanently and inevitably flawed. And you are beautiful.

Let me ask you something, in all the years that you have…undressed in front of a gentleman has he ever asked you to leave? Has he ever walked out and left? No? It’s because he...

I think your whole life shows in your face and you should be proud of that.

The beauty myth sets it up this way: A high rating as an art object is the most valuable tribute a woman can exact from her lover. If he appreciates her face and body because...

The stronger that women grow, the more prestige, fame, and money is accorded to the display professions: They are held higher and higher above the heads of rising women, for them to emulate.

Then there was the realisation that I didn’t actually feel that much better when I was thin(ner). In fact the ‘thin’ version felt worse because I lived with hunger clawing at my stomach all the...

It’s never been true, not anywhere at any time, that the value of a soul, of a human spirit, is dependent on a number on a scale. We are unrepeatable beings of light and space...

How beautiful would it be if we could just see souls instead of bodies? To see love and compassion instead of curves.

Beauty discrimination has become necessary, not from the perception that women will not be good enough, but that they will be, as they have been, twice as good.

It wasn’t a perfect body but it was the body she deserved. Not just from every bar of chocolate or bag of crisps or laden plate of food that she’d eaten. This body was also...

The best way to reach your destination is to just keep going until you get there.

Perhaps a past of bingeing, restricting, or purging comes back to haunt you from time to time. Maybe you have to fight hard battles against vanity, gluttony, and shame. But with God’s saving power, every...

Sadly, the signals that allow men and women to find the partners who most please them are scrambled by the sexual insecurity initiated by beauty thinking. A woman who is self-conscious can’t relax to let...

Healthy” and “diseased,” as Susan Sontag points out…are often subjective judgments that society makes for its own purposes. Women have long been defined as sick as a means of subjecting them to social control.

You are you, no one else is you, you are the right you, and the right you, is the you that you love.

When she thinks of the toxins built up inside of her from so many years of eating carelessly, of the resentment that has grown steadily over fifteen years of marriage, of the stretch marks and...

and when hecatches meoff guardand says’i love you’i catch himoff guardand say ‘i need your help.

Anita Johnston, Ph.D., author of Eating in the Light of the Moon, taught me to look in the mirror with curiosity rather than fear. So I may look at my reflection and think, ‘That’s interesting....

What are other women really thinking, feeling, experiencing, when they slip away from the gaze and culture of men?

Why does the social order feel the need to defend itself by evading the fact of real women, our faces and voices and bodies, and reducing the meaning of women to these formulaic and endlessly...

Healthy emotions come in all sizes. Healthy minds come in all sizes. And healthy bodies come in all sizes.

Weight (too much or too little) is a by-product. Weight is what happens when you use food to flatten your life. Even with aching joints, it’s not about food. Even with arthritis, diabetes, high blood...

Keep it real … wear the “no photoshop seal

Men who read it [beauty pornography] don’t do so because they want women who look like that. The attraction of what they are holding is that it is not a woman, but a two-dimensional woman-shaped...

The human body is the most ordinary of things, yet also the most extraordinary.

I was on a path, and I became determined to give it everything I had — no matter what.

You are a beloved child of God. But please remember this, too: You are human. You cannot expect to eat perfectly, look perfect, or be perfect. When you stumble, pick yourself up, even if you...

Men are visually aroused by women’s bodies and less sensitive to their arousal by women’s personalities because they are trained early into that response, while women are less visually aroused and more emotionally aroused because...

Beauty’ is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West is is the last, best belief system that keeps male...

You know you’ve got problems when your head is hanging over the toilet, puking up your dinner, and what you’re thinking of is your dad. And how he thinks you’re not pretty.

Sometimes I look in the mirror and think I’m really good looking. Then other times I think my body’s all wrong.

it’s not his bodythat changesright away.it’s somethinginside. he sayshe wants tobe a littleweaker. i don’tunderstand.i say ‘thinner?’and he says’no, i wantto be strongerin a differentway.’ notbecause of me,but for me.

I found myself stuck into a Gertrude’s Dream Waltz universe. Like Gertrude, I was trapped inside a body that bellied little of the person inside, while simultaneously ensnared in a home filled with people that...

Our society does reward beauty on the outside over health on the inside. Women must not be blamed for choosing short-term beauty ‘fixes’ that harm our long-term health, since our life spans are inverted under...

Where woman do not fit the Iron Maiden [societal expectations/assumptions about women’s bodies], we are now being called monstrous, and the Iron Maiden is exactly that which no woman fits, or fits forever. A woman...