Status Updates From The Body Myth: Adult Women ...

Life is not a destination but a journey of self-discovery.

I was scared of everything else. I thought all those bad feelings would be too much for me.

Our experience gets richer if we move forward with a willingness to learn and change. Trying to freeze time or live in the past doesn’t work and brings no satisfaction.

This may be the first time you ever address some life issues head-on. It will not be easy, but these feelings will not last forever.

It is important to ask therapists what underlying philosophy or philosophies guide their work. These various models can be, and often are, integrated.

Some women feel hopeless, convinced that they cannot get better because they have been sick for so long. Too afraid to hope, they feel sure that they will fail at recovery, and then feel even worse about themselves. Their hopelessness and ambivalence are self-protective.

One of every forty women in the United States has risky gel-filled breast implants, even though the Food and Drug Administration banned their use for most women in 1992—and rejected an industry challenge to the ban in 2004.

In today’s media and marketing culture, it is increasingly rare to find a woman’s body that bears much resemblance to the female body‘s natural shape.

It's exciting to read ahead on a book from the library. It's due back tomorrow!

In some present-day Arab countries, for example, rotund women are considered more desirable, and women fret that their husbands will leave them for larger women. As a result, women strive to be big, and some girls are actually force-fed to make them fat. It is a pattern that looks like an eerie mirror image of anorexia. Why do these women do it? Apparently for the same reasons Western women do.

Children easily get caught in the crossfire of addictive families and often are blamed to feel responsible for problems they didn’t create.

Social historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg notes that shopping is a common bond between mother and daughters today. Connection by consumerism and body to satisfaction can never satisfy the deep hunger daughters and mothers have for intimacy.

While everything else felt threatening or out of control, Mom or Grandma cooked and served wonderful meals. Food was a refuge and the only positive expression of love. Years later, these women maintain a love-hate relationship with food, often punishing them selves by eating too much or too little.

If we restrict food intake for substantial lengths of time, simply beginning to eat more food is literally a physical challenge.

Women obsessed with body image and eating use their disorders to foster an identity that seems unique, memorable, and worthwhile. On the surface, this seems to work.

Eating disorders often serve as an unconscious response to physical and/or sexual abuse in our present or past. Starving, binging, and other ritualistic eating disordered behaviors can symbolize limits we need in order to protect against further hurt or intrusion by others.

Adult women addicted to tobacco each spend thousands of dollars a year for cigarettes while increasing their risks for serious health problems.

Women and men both tend to think of fathers as second-class parents, giving fathers a pass on child-rearing responsibilities—and child-rearing joys too.

Although it is not yet recognized as a medical diagnosis, this behavior is known as orthorexia, which means “fixation or righteous eating.” If a woman with orthorexia doesn’t have access to her specific foods, she becomes extremely anxious and feels out of control.

Eating disorders are detectable illnesses that affect the sufferer’s physical, psychological, spiritual, emotional, and relationship life.