Two Whole Cakes Quotes

“Everyone deserves respect and justice no matter what they look like.”
― Lesley Kinzel, Two Whole Cakes: How to Stop Dieting and Learn to Love Your Body

“Don't let your own life pass you by because you're trying to tell me how to live mine.”
― Lesley Kinzel, Two Whole Cakes: How to Stop Dieting and Learn to Love Your Body

“If you love yourself unconditionally - as you should, even if no one else does - then fatter or thinner, you are at home in your body.”
― Lesley Kinzel, Two Whole Cakes: How to Stop Dieting and Learn to Love Your Body

“The wonder of self-acceptance isn't that it makes you instantly attractive to everyone; it's that it makes you not care particularly whether other folks uniformly find you attractive or not.”
― Lesley Kinzel, Two Whole Cakes: How to Stop Dieting and Learn to Love Your Body

“came to understand for the first time ever the importance of being healthy, and I don’t mean the universalizing and troubling concept of “diet conscious” our culture currently prefers, but the kind of healthy that encourages and cultivates a knowledge and awareness of your unique body and what it can be reasonably asked to do, and to never feel shame if your body does not operate by the same rules as someone else’s body. I’m talking about a healthy that is rooted in self-determination and individual autonomy, and is thus applicable to a spectrum of bodies, including professional athletes, cancer survivors, gym rats, the doctor-phobic, the poor, joggers, and folks with a limited supply of spoons, a healthy that excludes no one and that is specific and relative to the individual.”
― Lesley Kinzel, Two Whole Cakes: How to Stop Dieting and Learn to Love Your Body

“This word fat is a souvenir, thrust from my throat and the space between my lungs with all the emphasis and force with which it is flung at me by strangers as an insult. I have earned it. It belongs to me now. You’ll never take it back.”
― Lesley Kinzel, Two Whole Cakes: How to Stop Dieting and Learn to Love Your Body

“You are not required to be awesome in your fatness. I do not need you to be awesome in your fatness in order for me to feel justified in being awesome in my own. You can be awesome in your fatness, if you want, or you can choose another way to be. I will continue on with my own life in my own body no matter what you decide. I just want you to know that awesomeness is possible.”
― Lesley Kinzel, Two Whole Cakes: How to Stop Dieting and Learn to Love Your Body

“The wonder of self-acceptance isn’t that it makes you instantly attractive to everyone; it’s that it makes you not care particularly whether other folks uniformly find you attractive or not.”
― Lesley Kinzel, Two Whole Cakes: How to Stop Dieting and Learn to Love Your Body

“The praise lavished on plus-size models is simply a matter of moving the goalposts; these women are marginally wider versions of the same idealized shapes to which we are accustomed. So we take a woman in the same style and increase the proportions. It’s still the same body, just larger on the page.”
― Lesley Kinzel, Two Whole Cakes: How to Stop Dieting and Learn to Love Your Body

“Crystal Renn, arguably the most successful and recognizable plus-size model in recent memory, told the New York Times, “They see a roll, and they say, ‘Ooh, a roll!’ And they focus on it.”It isn’t diversity that the women’s magazines and high-fashion auteurs are after; it’s shock, amazement, attention, and a lot of self-congratulatory back-patting for their progressiveness and willingness to buck the oppressive norms that they themselves are responsible for shaping and enforcing.”
― Lesley Kinzel, Two Whole Cakes: How to Stop Dieting and Learn to Love Your Body

“The drawback is that while we can use fashion as a back-door method of confronting prejudice, this also results in massive pressure for fat people to be extra put-together, all the time, to be respectable fatasses, to stand in opposition to those unacceptable fat people, the ones who wear sweatpants and shirts with grease stains on them. You know them. The ones who make fat people look bad, like every stereotype is deserved, like we really are the disgusting horrors that we’re made out to be.”
― Lesley Kinzel, Two Whole Cakes: How to Stop Dieting and Learn to Love Your Body

“Your body is not a tragedy. This is important. This is something you should know before we go any further. Speak it aloud if it helps. Write it down. Tell someone, “My body is not a tragedy.” Whatever else it might be, it is not tragic. Tragedy may yet befall it, or may have already done so, but your body is not the things that happen to it, the things that are forced upon it, or even its failures to perform to certain standards. Your body simply is.”
― Lesley Kinzel, Two Whole Cakes: How to Stop Dieting and Learn to Love Your Body