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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Lexie Kite
Read between
March 7 - March 26, 2023
eventually realized that, even in an age of female fighter pilots and #MeToo, boys’ clothes are largely designed to be practical, while girls’ are designed to be pretty . . . It’s not just about avoiding skinned knees, but also the subtle and discouraging message that’s woven right into girls’ garments: you are dressed to decorate, not to do.” The more we teach girls they are here
We can learn to see our experiences, our pain, and our joys as part of the larger human experience rather than seeing them as separating and isolating. Suffering, failure, and inadequacies are part of the human condition. All people—including you—are worthy of care and compassion.
To individually and collectively heal the next generation of girls’ body image issues, we must work to reject these oppressive thin ideals in our own lives instead of turning that divisive view on our daughters, younger sisters, nieces, and friends.
For kids, say something like, “Our fat keeps us warm, protects our insides, and our bodies use it as energy. Isn’t that cool?” or “You are so lucky your body has fat on it—that means you’re alive and well.” Talk openly about how some bodies have more fat than others, for lots of different reasons, and that how much fat a person has on their body doesn’t tell you anything else about them, including how healthy they are, how strong they are, how nice or smart or successful or happy or lovable or anything else.
The most important work you can do to buoy up the body images of younger generations is to be aware of your own biases and prejudices about fat, cellulite, stretch marks, weight gain, and anything else you tend to despise in your own body and others’. You need to not only hide those harmful biases and self-deprecating tendencies from your kids, but also actively show them what you appreciate in yourself and others. Show them what you value in the ways you speak about your own body and others’—even celebrities’. Do
When you recognize others’ humanity, including the variables that go into why they are wearing what they are wearing, you will be compelled to err on the side of compassion rather than automatic judgment or discipline.
Just like it is incredibly difficult to feel positively about your body when you’re judging it based on looks, it is incredibly difficult to feel positively about your health when you are judging it based on looks.
Even if a person has no significant complaints of health issues, many doctors will still prescribe weight loss to get her into the “normal” weight range, usually defined by BMI.
Plenty of research has been done in the last several years on the problems with correlating a person’s weight with their health, as well as how ineffective it is to determine someone’s healthy weight according to the body mass index.
Our efforts to lose weight by any means necessary often hurt us in the process, leading to cycles of restricting and bingeing, disordered eating, compulsive overexercising, use of unregulated and dubious over-the-counter supplements, and abuse of prescription or illegal drugs.
One of the real difficulties in helping people understand the harms of disordered eating and dieting for weight control or weight loss is that the conventional wisdom says thinness by any means necessary equals good health.
recognize wellness culture for what it was—a dangerous con that seduces smart women with pseudoscientific claims of increasing energy, reducing inflammation, lowering the risk of cancer and healing skin, gut and fertility problems. But at its core, ‘wellness’ is about weight loss. It demonizes calorically dense and delicious foods, preserving a vicious fallacy: Thin is healthy and healthy is thin.” This conflation of thinness and weight loss as “wellness” by
Just like we need to redefine beauty in ways that are better for our health, we need to redefine health in ways that have nothing to do with beauty.
These photos are often accompanied by a caption about how embarrassing this is and how I can’t believe I’ve let myself get to this point, but I’m determined to change my life and get my body back! Sound familiar? Probably. And
more than a “before.” More than an “after.” More than a body to view and evaluate from outside of ourselves.
Our culture’s fixation on defining and advertising fitness through before-and-after photos serves salespeople and companies very well, but it doesn’t do the rest of us much good in terms of body image or sustained progress toward real health and fitness goals. One of the major reasons why these transformation photos often distract and discourage people from healthy behaviors is that they reinforce the notion that visible results are the only way to illustrate health success.
Even comparing your current “before” body to your body ten years ago (which may have then also been your “before” body!) doesn’t often induce feelings of joy.
Even the most sincere and well-meaning “before” images and captions about starting fresh and really focusing on caring for yourself and changing your life will inevitably disparage others with similar or less-ideal bodies.
It is no one’s intention to put anyone else down with their transformation photos, but that reality can’t be ignored in an objectifying world that ranks and values bodies according to size and shape. Your “before” will be someone else’s “after.” Your “after” will be someone else’s “before.” Sharing these images online guarantees the possibility of hurting people you never intended to hurt, and hurting your future self.
Before-and-after photos tend to reinforce the assumption that you can measure lots of things about your life based on how your body looks, whether it’s your health, happiness, desirability, or self-confidence. When you learn to see more in yourself and your health, you see that the look of your body does not always correlate with your health or happiness. It’s just not the way our bodies or our lives work.
As much as we want to believe “before” photos always represent depression and lack of self-control while “after” photos always represent perfect discipline, self-love, happiness, acceptance, and endless confidence, these are myths. Extremely common, money-making, hope-generating myths.
You are not a before or an after, whether you love what shows up in the photo or you don’t. Your weight gain and weight loss and muscle gain and muscle loss are just that—weight fluctuations and muscle fluctuations. They are not the full picture of your health, nor of your happiness or fulfillment.
instead of thinking of yourself in static, reductive terms of “before” or “after,” you thought of yourself as in between those
two points: during. Any photo you take of yourself right now is just a “during” shot, captured as you experience your ever-evolving, ever-learning existence.
We need to embrace a new paradigm; one that does not stigmatize people for their size, but rather encourages everyone to engage in healthier behaviors for their own intrinsic value . . . Fit and healthy bodies come in all shapes and sizes. And we need to acknowledge that the roads to a fitter and healthier body are wide enough for everyone.
My body is an instrument, not an ornament. This mantra shifts your outlook from form to function and feeling, from an outsider-focused view to an insider knowledge. Our bodies are instruments for our own personal use, experience, and benefit—not ornaments to be admired.
Don’t decide what you want to weigh or how you want to look—decide how you want to feel, what you want to do, and what you want to experience along the way.
We have been fed so much pseudoscientific diet culture misinformation that food has become a minefield for lots of people. What we “should” and “shouldn’t” eat varies from week to week and “expert” to “expert.” This drives people into endless cycles of harmful restricting and bingeing, which messes with our metabolic systems, our hormones, our health, and our lives.
The solution to getting off the diet roller coaster and learning to trust your own body is to take a more mindful approach to food and body image. Both of the aforementioned books are fantastic resources for learning to eat intuitively. Making the locus of control our own senses and intuitions rather than profit-driven diets is a powerful way to gain a more balanced relationship with food and to reconnect with our own bodies. For people whose ideas about living a healthy lifestyle are dominated by restrictive diets and exercising for weight loss or maintenance, unlearning those ideas and
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It is important to be aware of how kids are dealing with the food and diet talk that is likely surrounding them, as well. If you want to avoid pulling your kids into the waters of objectification to struggle alongside you, you have to start by fixing your own faulty beliefs and habits. Throw out your diet books. Unfollow thinness-focused accounts and influencers. Ditch your bathroom scale. Eat that slice of birthday cake with everyone else. Don’t moralize food as “good” or “bad,” but instead talk about the ways it makes you feel, the variety of flavors and colors that are important to have,
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Talk to them about how our bodies need and want food for lots of reasons, including for fuel and for enjoyment, and that by paying attention to how they feel when they eat, they can take better care of their bodies and trust that their bodies will lead them toward choices that are good for them and that have nothing to do with their body size or shape. Let them know strict diets hurt our bodies by confusing them about what to do with the food we eat—in fact, sometimes they prompt our bodies to store more of its energy than we really need, because our bodies think we might be starving and are
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If you’re looking for a way to get a better grasp on your health status than what a “before” picture or scale displays, consider checking in with your doctor or other trusted health care professional. Be open that you are working to avoid focusing on weight, size, and any other appearance-oriented goals. Ask for help to get greater insights into your health, including your blood pressure, resting heart rate, blood sugar levels, cholesterol, risk factors for illness or disease, and even just feedback on your lifestyle and habits or how you’re feeling about your overall wellness. Your provider
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So much of the health and “wellness” industry preys on people’s very real and warranted fears of debilitating illness and disease, but there are no surefire ways to ensure you never get sick or lose the ability to enjoy the function of your body. Even if you do your very best to appreciate and understand your body as an instrument instead of an ornament, that doesn’t mean your instrument will work as you would like it to.
Focusing on how you feel and what you can do will get you much further than simply focusing on decreasing fatness.
Physical activity, when approached with the right mind-set and expectations, can be a powerful tool for improving your body image. It can help you reunite with yourself as you experience the power and privilege of your body as your own. Your new mind-set relies on your internal, first-person perspective on your body and your goals. One of the greatest benefits of engaging with your body in this way is that when you are able to experience a powerful, instrumental sense of self, you are less prone to self-objectify. It requires effort and energy to experience your body through movement, but by
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to focus internally rather than how exercise might impact you externally. You can do this by finding any type of movement you enjoy and doing it mindfully and consciously while taking inventory of what you like (and don’t like) about it. Which muscles are being engaged? What is your breathing like? How do you feel in the process? If and when your attention goes to how you appear, push it back to what you are doing or experiencing. If you catch your mind worrying how your arms look while they jiggle each time you move them, shift it to focusing on how it feels to move your arms in that way.
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Enjoyable physical activity provides a great opportunity to get into a flow state, in which your attention is fully on the task at hand and nowhere near your appearance.
What we need right now is more women who have detoxed themselves so completely from the world’s expectations that they are full of nothing but themselves. What we need are women who are full of themselves. A woman who is full of herself knows and trusts herself enough to say and do what must be done. She lets the rest burn. —Glennon Doyle, Untamed
“It’s much, much worse than we ever envisioned. There are all kinds of industries both creating and feeding off these insecurities . . . If you just dropped in on any conversation, the amount of mental space that people take up with what they’re eating, what they’re not eating, their yoga routine, is expressive of the level of distress in our society.”
Your body image is not the literal image of how your body appears, or even your feelings about how it appears. It is your feelings about your body—the body you live inside, grew up with, and experience life through. Your body image can be perceived only from the inside and understood only from within.
We believe women are suffering not only because of the ways beauty is being defined; we are suffering because we are being defined by beauty. We are burdened with the task of looking beautiful and feeling beautiful (to others as well as to ourselves) because we live in a world that defines our value in terms of our physical appeal to others and defines our body image in terms of our physical appeal to ourselves. Being viewed as objects is the real root of our problem, not which beauty ideals are in vogue for female objects.
The body positivity movement offers a safer alternative to chasing unrealistic or unsustainable body ideals. Instead of trying to reach an impossible destination in order to feel confident, body positivity suggests you can achieve the hoped-for effect by reenvisioning yourself as already being there.
We think of body positivity like a life preserver because it provides temporary reprieve from the negative effects of body shame for some people, but no one intends to just hang on to a life preserver forever, even if it is extremely helpful in a time of need.
All too often, well-meaning people and companies end up reinventing the same limiting ideals that benefit some and marginalize others, just in a slightly expanded range of sizes.
Validating and appreciating the diversity of bodies that exist, while inclusive and helpful on the one hand, still centers the appearance of women’s bodies as their most important feature.
no one asks men to prove their confidence by posting Speedo pics on Instagram. (Well, straight men, that is. Gay men face similarly heightened body pressures as women do online and off, with much of the origin of both traceable to the sexualized male gaze of who is doing the looking, evaluating, and consuming—regardless of the gender of the person being consumed. Scholar Mitchell Wood expanded Laura Mulvey’s 1975 idea of the “male gaze” to include the “gay male gaze.” He writes, “Increasing the complexity of this objectification, gay men are both the subject and the executors of
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#bodypositivity has been co-opted by companies and individuals who are simply capitalizing on a trend to seek profits—something we call commodified body positivity. This profit-driven knockoff looks a lot like something truly groundbreaking for women, but it’s most often a simple rebranding of a product, service, or company, and these companies often continue to marginalize and objectify women and profit from their insecurity.
But audiences and consumers are manipulated to feel like progress for marginalized people is being made when it’s usually only profits from marginalized people being made.
We will always advocate for more diverse representations of all women in media, but we’ll know progress is happening when those same women aren’t required to take off their clothes in order to be included.
We need substantial, regular roles and representation for women of all shapes, sizes, colors, and ability levels that do not revolve around how they look, their weight-loss “journeys,” or how sexually appealing they can be. We want inclusion and representation, not equal-opportunity objectification.
