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Love Your Body Day

Hollywood and the fashion, cosmetics and diet industries work hard to make each of us believe that our bodies are unacceptable and need constant improvement. Print ads and television commercials reduce us to body parts — lips, legs, breasts — airbrushed and touched up to meet impossible standards. TV shows tell women and teenage girls that cosmetic surgery is good for self-esteem. Is it any wonder that 80% of U.S. women are dissatisfied with their appearance?

- LYBD

Body Image & Your Health

With a positive body image, a person has a real perception of her size and shape and feels comfortable and proud about her body. With a negative body image, a person has a distorted perception of her shape and size, compares her body to others, and feels shame, awkwardness, and anxiety about her body. A woman's dissatisfaction with her body affects how she thinks and feels about herself. A poor body image can lead to emotional distress, low self-esteem, dieting, anxiety, depression, and eating disorders.

- BI&YH

The Body Positive

WE TEACH young people to creatively transform the conditions in their lives that shape their relationships to food and movement. We use our compelling and straightforward educational materials to help people adopt the Health at Every Size philosophy, allowing them to enjoy healthy eating and physical activity in their natural bodies.

- TBP

iVillage: Love Your Body Forum

Join our lively debate on body image and self-acceptance.

- LYBF

Dove: Campaign for Real Beauty

92% of girls want to change at least one aspect of their appearance. Dove believes all girls deserve to see how beautiful they really are and is committed to raising self-esteem in girls everywhere. That's why we created the Dove Self-Esteem Fund.

- Dove

BodyCage

My aim is to try and help you see just what it is that you are doing to your precious self. I want to let you know that you are not alone in your world of mental and physical unrest. And to let you know that you are special. No-one deserves to go through the pain and suffering an eating disorder causes.

- Melinda Hutchings, BC

Beyond the Body Betrayed

As women, we are bombarded by conflicting messages about our bodies. We are expected to go to any lengths to shape and mold ourselves to fit the ideal, which seems to change weekly. We know we must be more than our weight, more than a pair of legs and a smile. Still, we feel defined by our bodies, yet somehow, disconnected from them. This isn't surprising. Our bodies are divided into pieces and judged, and that judgment is extended to our entire person.

- Steph, BtBB

Pat's Place: Romance novels with big beautiful heroines

After I decided to stop the self-destructive fad diets that I had lived on since the age of eleven, and accept myself as who I was born to be, I set about to write romance novels with Big Beautiful Heroines.

But the books aren't just for plus-size women. The message is for all women to love ourselves as we are and stop trying to be something we were never meant to be.

- Pat Ballard

AdiosBarbie.com: A Body Image Site for Every Body

As a kid, my friends were from many different ethnic backgrounds. We were fat, skinny and everything in between. But in spite of our diversity, we all felt the same pressure to fit a very narrow (and often impossible) definition of beauty. We all read magazines and felt inadequate comparing ourselves to the "perfect" models in their pages. Although we knew fashion magazines weren't reality, their message—"you don't measure up"—stuck anyway.

- Ophira, Editor & Thick Chick

About-Face

I have long been frustrated with the way women are depicted in our culture. In May 1995, a particular Calvin Klein ad was on buses and billboards all over San Francisco. It was advertising the Obsession perfume and showed supermodel, Kate Moss reclining nude, her bones accentuated by the lighting used during the photo shoot. She looked so young and gaunt, so frightened and vulnerable. This ad was the last straw for me. I wanted to make a statement that would be louder than just writing Calvin Klein a letter. I envisioned myself scrambling up scaffolding to deface billboards, or waiting at bus stops to attack an ad on the side of a bus! I knew other people were also tired of seeing Kate Moss photographed to look as scrawny and weak and vulnerable as possible and I wanted to do something big enough that all those other people might motivate to do something too. In the summer of 1995, I became an activist.

- Kathy Bruin, Founder

In Praise of Big Women

Far too many women these days are trying to lose weight who really shouldn't bother. If they are doing it to appeal to men in general they are probably wasting their time. If they are doing it for a specific man they should ask themselves if any man is worth punishing themselves for. Being a different shape or size will not make you a better person, it will not, of itself, make you happier. Many women starve themselves into a different body shape and find that, to their amazement, they are still the same person, they have not become happier, more worthy of love or respect.

- Martin Willett

I love my body

I have four pairs of size 5/6 jeans in my armoire that will never fit again. When I think about these jeans, I remember the girl who wore them as she drove across the bottom of America from Florida State Film School in Tallahassee, Fla. to Los Angeles, Calif. in August 2002. She thought that if she could only continue strictly adhering to Weight Watchers (read: starving oneself) and exercising like a maniac for a few more months, then she would finally have a fabulous body. She wore a size 3/4 dress to graduation. It didn't make anyone like her more. The people who loved and respected her still did, and the people who didn't, didn't. She did, admittedly, feel great. And maybe a little hungry and obsessed with what she'd eaten that day and how she hadn't worked out.

- Everyday Goddess

A Waist Is A Terrible Thing To Mind

We hope that A Waist is a Terrible Thing to Mind will serve as a springboard for more dialogue on the subject of body image and its impact on our physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. To this end, the book offers sample exercises meant to help the reader use this book as a way of exploring the relationship between health and self-image, either privately or within a circle of women.

A Call to Action,
by Cathy Conheim, L.C.S.W., Pages 177—179

Points: The Most Practical Program Ever to Improve Your Self-Image
by David A. Gustafson

For those who truly want success and happiness, this is the best book available. It offers A to Z practical advice on how you can improve the quality of your life each and every day.

The Body Image Workbook: An 8-Step Program for Learning to Like Your Looks
by Thomas F. Cash, Ph.D.

"Do you spend a lot of time, effort, and money attempting to "repair" your looks or achieve physical perfection?..."

Transforming Body Image: Love the Body You Have
by Marcia Germaine Hutchinson

"This book isn't about changing your body. It's about learning to love and accept the body you already have. It's making your body a home you can live with."

200 Ways to Love the Body You Have
by Marcia Germaine Hutchinson

"Make a home in your body ."

Bodylove: Learning to Like Our Looks and Ourselves : A Practical Guide for Women
by Rita Freedman

"An insightful guide...Any woman who has ever looked in the mirror and sighed should find it helpful."

- Mary Ellen Donovan, co-author of Women & Self-Esteem

Body Wars
by Margo Maine

"Here is basic ammunition for all of us caught in the crossfire of Body Wars."

- Rita Freedman, Ph.D. author, BodyLove

 

"I highly recommend this book to anyone who cares about better health for women and men."

- Michael Levine, Ph.D. co-author, Preventing Eating Disorders:

When Women Stop Hating Their Bodies : Freeing Yourself from Food and Weight Obsession
by Jane R. Hirschmann

"Will empower all women to stop believing that our bodies are the problems, dieting the solution."

- Harriet Lerner, Ph.D. author, The Dance of Anger

It's Not about Food: Change Your Mind; Change Your Life; End Your Obsession with Food and Weight
by Carol Emery Normandi & Laurelee Roark

"Women who read this book will be inspired to throw away their diets and scales and pick up on the nurturing, caring voice presented in these pages."

- Jane R. Hirschmann and Carol H. Munter, authors of Overcoming Overeating