Just to review, I was recently asked by Justine Hoepfner, an author and speaker who is currently developing an eating disorder recovery book, about the “top tips” I had related to eating disorder recovery. I’m planning on sharing with you some of what I shared with Justine during the next few posts.
If you missed Tip 1 on developing body empathy, check it out here.
Tip 2: Stop Supporting the Culture of Thinness
Lizzie Miller, as featured in Glamour magazine, after being considered by others as "too big for modeling."
As human beings, one of the most destructive things that we can do to ourselves, and to one another, is to support the culture of thinness that has emerged over the last century. As we have grown as women, both in size and in power, we have allowed our standard of beauty, our ideal, to shrink to the point where the woman is nothing but skin and bones. We have allowed corporate advertising executives and modeling agencies and Photoshop experts to define what is beauty and what is sexy and what is good. And to these individuals, in reality only a minute percentage of the population, beauty is angular nothingness. It is emaciation. It is emptiness. We as women know that this is not true. Beauty is heart and soul and mind and energy and love – all of the things that wither away when one begins to shrink in size and in person.
My research has been on programs that helps inoculate girls to the influence of the mass media and its perpetuation of the thin ideal. When I went into classrooms last year to run this program, I was energized by the bright and talented young women before me. And so when they began to talk about the way that the songs and movies and magazines make them feel – fat, deformed, inferior, less than – my heart broke.
As women we have an obligation to say no. No to unrealistic standards. No to nothingness and emptiness. That means canceling the magazine subscription, turning off America’s Next Top Model (if you feel it offers a limited portrayal of beauty), and deleting the email that promises a new butt by Christmas. One of the most important things we can do for our own recovery, and for our futures, is to stand up for what we know in our hearts is beauty and resist the urge to succumb to the fashion industry’s own conceptualization of what that is.
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nourishing the soul 