Eat Sweat Play Quotes

“Maybe exercise and sport can be something we do for ourselves. For fun! For Happiness! For clear thinking! Because physical activity should be something integral to our being alive. And it is the essential part that really concerns us here, not the bit about how many millimetres it might shave off your inside thigh measurements.”
― Anna Kessel, Eat Sweat Play: How Sport Can Change Our Lives

“Surely we want to get to a point where women can be strong and powerful and not sexy. Or only sexy when they feel like it, not as a requirement to getting media coverage or being valued.”
― Anna Kessel, Eat Sweat Play: How Sport Can Change Our Lives

“I think too often we forget that girls can like sport; we are not biologically programmed to detest it, we are - in the main - conditioned against it. But shouldn’t we try to change that?”
― Anna Kessel, Eat Sweat Play: How Sport Can Change Our Lives

“Just as women fought for the vote, and that very achievement compels us to the polling stations, so women have fought for the right to exercise and participate in sport, and we cannot throw that away. From the women of ancient Greece putting their lives on the line just by watching sport, and the women in Iran who continue to risk imprisonment today by doing the same, to the likes of Kathrine Switzer who campaigned for women to be allowed to run any distance they liked, or Caster Semenya and Dutee Chand who demand the right to participate in sport as women, without being told what their labia should look like. We”
― Anna Kessel, Eat Sweat Play: How Sport Can Change Our Lives

“The mainstream media perpetuates the notion that women should focus entirely on a static image of a perfect body as the end goal. There are no messages about the process, the active body, how it makes us feel in that moment.”
― Anna Kessel, Eat Sweat Play: How Sport Can Change Our Lives

“The real problem here is a massive elephant in the room: our own culture. Our social values, our media - so influential on impressionable young girls - that have been allowed, for millenia, to send out this powerful, alienating message about girls and sport: that sport is unfeminine, that sport makes you sweaty and muscular, that sport is swearing and violence, that sport is ugliness in a world where women’s sole priority, value and focus should be beauty and becoming an object of desire.”
― Anna Kessel, Eat Sweat Play: How Sport Can Change Our Lives

“All bodies are different, all bodies have their own individual way of reacting to the work we make them do.”
― Anna Kessel, Eat Sweat Play: How Sport Can Change Our Lives

“How much more time do we want to waste on this appearance stuff? How much more time do we really want to spend arguing over weather Kim Kardashian's naked arse is female empowerment or exploitation? All this discussion accompanying endless music videos with buttock-shaking slo-moes, selfies, belfies, conversation about implants, eating disorders Botox and dieting, is enough to make you get mad. Or contract body dysmorpjia, if you haven't already got it.”
― Anna Kessel, Eat Sweat Play: How Sport Can Change Our Lives

“One little run. One little walk. That's all it takes, and you're right back there. You haven't got lost. It hasn't gone away. It's all there just waiting for you, whenever you're ready to grab it.”
― Anna Kessel, Eat Sweat Play: How Sport Can Change Our Lives

“Just as we tell women today to vote, in honour of the suffragettes who campaigned for the right to do so, we owe it to these female sports pioneers to draw inspiration from their stories, to continue the fight.”
― Anna Kessel, Eat Sweat Play: How Sport Can Change Our Lives