Self-denial can lock women into a smug and critical condescension to other, less devout women.According to Appel, cult members develop…”an attitude of moral superiority, a contempt for secular laws, rigidity of thought, and the diminution...

Recovering is a process of coming to experience a sense of self. More precisely, it is a process of learning to sense one’s self, to attune to one’s subjective physical, psychic, and social self- experience....

Culture alone cannot explain the phenomena of such high rates of eating disorders. Eating disorders are complex, but what they all seem to have in common is the ability to distract women from the memories,...

I am angry that I starved my brain and that I sat shivering in my bed at night instead of dancing or reading poetry or eating ice cream or kissing a boy…

The surgeons’ market is imaginary, since there is nothing wrong with women’s faces or bodies that social change won’t cure; so the surgeons depend for their income on warping female self-perception and multiplying female self-hatred.

Even the models we see in magazines wish they could look like their own images.

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

To ask women to become unnaturally thin is to ask them to relinquish their sexuality.

Freedom from obsession is not about something you do; it’s about knowing who you are. It’s about recognizing what sustains you and what exhausts you. What you love and what you think you love because...

The beauty myth of the present is more insidious than any mystique of femininity yet: A century ago, Nora slammed the door of the doll’s house; a generation ago, women turned their backs on the...

Pain, too, comes from depths that cannot be revealed. We do not know whether those depths are in ourselves or elsewhere, in a graveyard, in a scarcely dug grave, only recently inhabited by withered flesh....

In her presence, I was reminded again of why I was an anoretic: fear. Of my needs, for food, for sleep, for touch, for simple conversation, for human contact, for love. I was an anoretic...

I’m learning how to taste everything.

The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon us…During the past decade, women breached the power structure;...

What was wrong with me? Why could I not just flip the switch and see all the brightness ahead if only I chose the correct path? Or rather, why could I see the correct path...

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...

If I had the capacity to withstand instantaneous physical pain, I think I would have even considered taking a razor to my leg. Because after so long of living in that hole, I would have...

…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....

For the first time in history, children are growing up whose earliest sexual imprinting derives not from a living human being, or fantasies of their own; since the 1960s pornographic upsurge, the sexuality of children...

It’s the soul that’s starving, not the body

If you put the wrong foods in your body, you are contaminated and dirty and your stomach swells. Then the voice says, Why did you do that? Don’t you know better? Ugly and wicked, you...

The leap of faith is this: You have to believe, or at least pretend you believe until you really believe it, that you are strong enough to take life face on. Eating disorders, on any...

One of the most dangerous myths surrounding eating disorders is that they are a life sentence.

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.

Invece respiro ancora. Con la responsabilità di chi è stato riammesso al gioco. Dopo un fallo contro la vita.

What editors are obliged to appear to say that men want from women is actually what their advertisers want from women.

The loneliness I endured during that time of my life is something I hope never to experience again.It’s more than just the feeling of being isolated. I was disconnected mentally, physically and emotionally from 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...

Cosmetic surgery is not “cosmetic,” and human flesh is not “plastic.” Even the names trivialize what it is. It’s not like ironing wrinkles in fabric, or tuning up a car, or altering outmoded clothes, the...

Maybe we choose to stay in a constant state of ignorance as a protective instinct — maybe I was just in denial. I just don’t get how you can be completely in love with someone...

Your lowest moment and life can be your best if you survive it and learn from it

Some people who are obsessed with food become gourmet chefs. Others become eating disorders.

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

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...

Premevo la lama come si fa con la maniglia della porta. Sperando di entrare in un’altra vita.

Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through men’s eyes when deciding what provokes it.

There ARE people who won’t customarily eat an entire row of cookies, or hear food calling their name from other rooms, or who don’t grind up food in the garbage disposal for fear of eating...

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...

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:...

I need to make myself strong on the inside instead of what is on the outside. I know all of this, but why can’t I put any of it into action? I guess that’s why...

Love—the desire to love and be loved, to hold and be held, to give love even if your experience as a recipient has been compromised or incomplete—is the constant on the continuum of hunger, it’s...

If I had lady-spider legs, I would weave a sky where the stars lined up. Matresses would be tied down tight to their trucks, bodies would never crash through windshields. The moon would rise above...

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...

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...

Between 10 and 20 percent of people with anorexia die from heart attacks, other complications and suicide; the disease has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness. Or Kitty could have lost her life...

To live in a culture in which women are routinely naked where men aren’t is to learn inequality in little ways all day long. So even if we agree that sexual imagery is in fact...

To lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself.

Our work is not to change what you do, but to witness what you do with enough awareness, enough curiosity, enough tenderness that the lies and old decisions upon which the compulsion is based become...

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...

From the newsstands a dozen models smiled up at her from a dozen magazine covers, smiled in thin-faced, high-cheekboned agreement to Kessa’s new discovery. They knew the secret too. They knew thin was good, thin...