On Airbrushing..

Britney Spears has certainly lived out a few ups and downs in the public eye, but over the past year or so, she has remained relatively under the radar. Think what you want of Britney--this isn't an opinion piece on the life and times of Miss Spears; the purpose of bringing her up is to highlight something that she did recently that will hopefully impact many women all over the world.

So what did she do? She shot some photos for Candies, a clothing/shoe brand, as part of their new ad campaign-- and allowed the brand to release the un-airbrushed photos alongside the digitally altered photos so that we could see the differences that exist between these photos. In a society where unrealistic standards of beauty continue to be perpetuated, this act is a breath of fresh air in that it provides women of all ages a very clear example of the way that what we see is not always real! For a culture (ours) that exalts the beauty we see in print ads and pictures in magazines, it is pretty disturbing that most of these images have been doctored and are not representative of reality. I think on some level we may realize this, but seeing it really drives the point home.

Let me just say... Britney looks great in both photos. While the difference in the two pictures is very small, it is important for women to see that even Britney Spears has a little bit of cellulite. Does that keep her from being beautiful? No! Does that keep her from being successful? No way! So then why is it that we are prone to think that a little cellulite can keep us from being good enough? Or beautiful? To view the pictures of Britney before and after, follow this link. Scroll all the way down to see both pictures. I wish I could post them on my blog but I'm too tech-unsaavy to figure out how to do it :-).

Celebrities acknowledging and releasing un-airbrushed photos has become somewhat of a trend lately- Kim Kardashian, Kelly Clarkson and Faith Hill have all spoken out about the way their photos have been altered in print. I think the take away point here is that we have to be discerning about what we see. When we see pictures in magazines (etc), we must remember that what we see is not always what is real. Considering how much value we often attribute to these images and the lengths to which so many of us go to in order to look like these women (and their bodies), ... it is a real wake-up call, since even they do not have these bodies! We might say that our culture has created an unattainable ideal of beauty, but just to be clear, it is actually unattainable! It is manufactured via photoshop! While it is pretty difficult to avoid these images, I would urge you to view media with discerning eyes because what we see is not representative of reality. So next time you are flipping through a magazine, just remember that what you are seeing is more than likely not an accurate representation of women, beauty and bodies.

Jenni Schaefer on Recovery

It's been a busy few days for me and it's time for bed, but I read a great piece today on eating disorder recovery written by Jenni Schaefer that I want to point you all to! It is a pretty challenging read for those of you who may be contemplating giving up your eating disorder, for those of you who are in recovery, and for everyone in between. Follow this link to check it out, or see below for a copy/pasted version.

Eating Disorder Recovery: Easier On The Other Side

If you are waiting for recovery to be easy, pull up a chair. You will be waiting for a long time. Ed (aka “eating disorder”) will gladly sit by your side and wait with you. To sabotage your success, Ed will even act like he supports certain aspects of your recovery.

If you like to read, Ed will say, “Just read this book about recovery, and you will be fine.” He will let you read the book, and congratulate you on doing it, but he won’t let you follow any of the guidance inside that will actually help you.

If you enjoy being around people, Ed will say, “Go to that therapy group, and get some help there.” Ed will let you go to the group, and may even let you participate, but he won’t let you talk about what you really need to talk about in order to heal.

If you like to surf the Internet, Ed will say, “Here’s a great website for you. Go ahead and join the online recovery forum.” He will let you join the online forum, and he will convince you that logging on is more important than eating.

Books, groups, and online resources can all be very helpful tools in your recovery. Just remember that recovery takes full commitment and real action. Real action is not simply opening a book, walking into a group room, or logging onto some website.

If you read a book about recovery, fully commit to the ideas in it that will make a difference in your life, not just the things that are easy to do. If you are in group therapy, talk about the issues that, deep inside, you know you need to discuss. If you are active in an online recovery community, use the positive support from online pals to hold yourself accountable to taking real action in your recovery. It’s not enough to just look at the tools—you really do have to use them.

Real action means drastic change. It also means realizing that Ed will sit by your side and try to sabotage you every step of the way. Ed will even use content from recovery books, groups, and websites to try to fuel his cause. Be aware of this and guard against it, and do what the books, groups, and websites suggest that is pro-recovery. Now that’s action.

The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous says, “Half measures availed us nothing.” If you only do eating disorder recovery half way, at most, you will get a half way recovery from your eating disorder. In my experience, you won’t even get that.

During early recovery, I believed that insight would inspire change. I thought that if I just knew enough about eating disorders, and understood myself, I would get better. I learned as much as I could from all of the resources available to me, and I waited for a magical change. I waited for the urge to binge to just go away. I waited to fall in love with my body. I waited for my fear of food to simply subside. And Ed waited right along with me.

I waited. I waited, and I waited some more. I would still be waiting today if intense pain had not pushed me into taking some real action. In my personal experience, pain and discomfort have most often been the motivating factors to get me to change. (For the record, I don’t think it has to be this way. That is why I write about my experiences. I hope that other people won’t have to reach the same level of pain I did before making changes.)

In my recovery, taking action meant tackling the food directly. I stopped purging after bingeing. I also did my best to not binge, which meant tolerating uncomfortable feelings (to say the very least). I ate without restricting. My body changed accordingly, and I felt awful. I felt so bad that I told my mom many times that I would rather be dead than to live that way any longer. I hated the way my body was changing, and I hated how it made me feel inside even more. I felt like a different person entirely --- someone I didn’t know or like. I felt trapped.

When we fully commit to recovery, we are signing up for hurt. Full commitment means we no longer make decisions based on how we feel in the short run (turning to Ed for immediate gratification), but instead we make decisions based on our long-term goals of health and a full recovery. In the beginning, success can actually feel fat and miserable. So stop waiting for things to be easy and start looking for the hard part. Tackling the difficult, ironically, is when the “easy” will find you. If you push through the pain and move all the way to the other side, you won’t have to keep facing the same hurt over and over again. You will be well on your way to freedom.

Life is, in fact, much easier on the other side of the eating disorder. I am not afraid of food, I don’t get the urge to binge, and I love my body. Yes, I said “love”! Today success feels strong and joyful, no longer fat and miserable. I can’t wait for you to get to this point, too.

And you can’t afford to wait either! So, stop waiting and start changing.

Appointed to the Ambassador Council of the National Eating Disorders Association, Jenni Schaefer is a singer/songwriter, speaker, and author of Life Without Ed and Goodbye Ed, Hello Me. She is a consultant with the Center For Change in Orem, Utah. For more information, visit www.jennischaefer.com.

What Defines You?

I was with a group of women yesterday leading a discussion on body image. We had such great conversations, but the one thing that kept coming up in our discussion (that comes up all the time!) is the pervasive idea that once we achieve our ideal weight or our ideal 'look', then we will be happy and complete and fulfilled. I think this is certainly a deception and a myth that our culture and the media sell us and encourage us to believe about ourselves. Have you ever thought that being your ideal weight/size/appearance would make you happy??

I am sure that we all have had thoughts like this at one point or another, but I fear that others of us have such thoughts most of the time. Yesterday, I talked with these women about how they define themselves, and where their self-worth and value comes from. One of the women said that her worth most certainly comes from the number that she sees on the scale each day. She said that she wished it weren't that way, but culturally that is what has been communicated as important, so she feels that the number that she sees each day on the scale is what makes her valuable and worthwhile. That made me so sad because we really are SO much more than our weight, our size, our bodies, our looks. We are too interesting, too complex, too great to be contained or defined by those things; we do ourselves such an injustice when we define ourselves and limit ourselves in these ways.

One thing that I encouraged these women to do, which I challenge myself and all of you to do as well, is to think about the people in your life that mean the most to you- whether it is family, a marriage partner or relationship, friends, or all of the above. When you think of the people that mean the most to you, consider what comes to mind. I doubt it is someone's weight or size. When you think of the people in your life that you love, you think of qualities that make them unique to who they are, or personality traits, or even experiences, memories, laughs and sorrows that have been shared between you.

At the risk of sounding cliche, I think it is important for us to focus our energy on developing character and inner beauty, and a sense of value and purpose which far outweigh our physical bodies. I believe that by simply being alive we have an innate sense of worth! We were created uniquely and wonderfully. It's not that wearing make-up, getting dressed up, or caring what we look like is bad- because it definitely isn't!!! But I think we sell ourselves short when we assume that if we could reach our 'ideal' weight, then our lives would be complete and we would finally be content. If you're not happy now, what makes you think you will be happy 5 pounds from now? This pathway of thinking is so deceptive and so destructive. When we base our worth and our value on things that change (cultural standard of beauty, what others think, etc), our happiness and peace of mind are never secure. That is no way to live! It is important to be rooted and grounded- whether that means finding your sense of worth and value in your faith, or finding it elsewhere, this is something worth meditating on and considering. After all, we only have one life to live, and being content and at peace is a much better way to go through life! It's also much better to go through life loving who you are and being able to appreciate the beauty you possess instead of wishing that you looked like someone else or were different than you are! We were all made beautiful- so let's work on being aware of that beauty and celebrating it in each other and ourselves.

Michelle Obama and Jessica Simpson?

This has been such a busy week for me and I haven't had a lot of extra time to blog! But I do have some posts I am working on that I'm looking forward to sharing soon. In the meantime, I'd like to share an opinion piece that I read last week because I think it was spot on when it comes to the Goldilocks syndrome I wrote about a few weeks ago (read about that here!). I don't know why, but I'm always pleasantly surprised to read such thought provoking pieces about body image and weight on the Huffington Post. The HP recently added a 'body image' page to their site, which highlights stories about weight, eating disorders, body image and all things related- very cool. Anyways, below is the article I mentioned above, by Charlotte Hilton Andersen. Hope that you enjoy this piece and that it challenges you to examine where you can find middle ground in your life!

You know it's a weird month in celeb-land when Good Housekeeping cover girl, Michelle Obama,is photoshopped within an inch of her life and Marie Claire cover girl, Jessica Simpson, is not only un-airbrushed, but also sans makeup.

Both women are known for their beauty (oh, and by the way, Ms. Obama might also be married to the President of the United States, or something) and have been targets of intense media scrutiny regarding their looks. So it is fitting that each in her own way -- and you can't possibly be more surprised than I am that I'm putting Michelle Obama and Jessica Simpson into the same category -- is on a current campaign to reshape global attitudes about our bodies.

Ms. Obama has made headlines recently for departing from previous First Ladies' safe platforms and tackling the touchy subject of childhood obesity. After launching a nationwide initiative to "end childhood obesity in one generation" she reinforced her point by revamping the traditional Easter celebration at the White House. This past weekend she removed all candy from the candy-infested holiday and instead treated children to exercise stations hosted by Olympic athletes, hand-washing stations and the inexplicably named "pre-screened" fruit in their goody bags.

Strangely, the same media that laments the obesity crisis on a daily basis lambasted the First Lady for "stealing Easter." The Easter Bunny notes that he is "not threatened" by Ms. Obama, although he thinks some of the Olympians might have been looking at him funny.

Also making mixed headlines, Ms. Simpson has been traveling the world for her new reality show "The Price of Beauty" showing what women in other cultures perceive as beautiful and the means they use to achieve it. This week's episode had the girls and their hairstylist visiting Uganda to watch women being fattened in the name of beauty. This ritual, which to my Western eyes seems every bit as eating disordered as anorexia or bulimia, highlights an important point: not everyone thinks thin is as in as we do. In fact, adiposity is adorable in some cultures.

Somewhere in these extreme messages, there is a middle ground. Catwalk thinness and obesity are both undesirable from a health perspective. And neither should be a moral statement about the person possessing said body. Now, if only we didn't have to photoshop our already-gorgeous First Lady or take contrived pictures of the already-gorgeous Jessica Simpson to prove it.

To view the article as it was published on the HP, follow this link.

Teenage Girls and Body Image: A Lesson For All of Us

According to a new study published in the March issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior (2010), teenage girls tend to compare their bodies more to their peers (who appear to be more similar to themselves) than they do to celebrities in the media (who appear to be in a 'different league'). An article published recently by Nancy Tracy on this very subject points to the Social Comparison Theory, a psychological theory which holds that more often than not people tend to compare themselves more to people who are similar to themselves than to those who seem to be inferior or superior. So- for example, rather than comparing your cooking skills to someone who is featured on the Food Network, maybe you compare your cooking skills to those of your neighbor, sister, friend, cousin, etc. And the analogy follows with anything- your looks, your athletic ability, your body, etc. Anyways, what they found was that in schools where the average BMI (body mass index) was higher, girls felt less pressure to diet and be thin, whereas in schools where the average BMI was lower, girls felt increased pressure to be thinner.


I think that the results of this study are powerful in that they affirm what we might already know and experience about what happens when we make comparisons about ourselves to others- which is that often, we feel that we need to be something other than what we are. We feel like we don't measure up to those around us, or that we are just not as good as so-and-so. Teenage girls might compare themselves to their peers more than they do to celebrities, but who knows what the statistics look like for adults (who probably compare themselves equally to their peers and celebrities). I think the media still shapes and influences our standards of beauty in a way that we may never fully comprehend, but I think the act of comparing ourselves to others is an important thing to step back and evaluate.


Someone very wise once told me that "comparison is the thief of all joy" and that has stuck with me ever since-- it is so true! That phrase often comes to mind because we are conditioned to look around us to see where we fit in the pecking order, and usually the act of comparing ourselves to others leads to feelings of inferiority, insecurity, anxiety, frustration, discontentment, and so on. Whenever we compare ourselves to others, we don't usually feel better about ourselves- we feel worse! And on the rare occasion that we do feel better, the sense of confidence we gain from that is false and empty. One quote (by Max Ehrmann) that I love which speaks to this: “If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.” We all at times are so busy worrying about how we measure up that we lose out on being ourselves, and we aren't able to enjoy who God made us to be. Another one of my favorite quotes is by Judy Garland- she said, "Be a first-rate version of yourself, rather than a second-rate version of someone else." I think she had it right! We are the only ones who can be the best at being us- so let's focus on that!! We all have strengths, talents and interests that make us unique and when we aren't able to see those for what they are, we miss out! The next time you find yourself comparing yourself to someone else, stop and consider your God-given strengths, abilities and beauty. The idea is not to become vain or to become self-absorbed; however, it is important that we strive to see ourselves for who we are, rather than viewing ourselves through a filter that is designed to categorize and classify our worth based on another.






*On a side note, one other thing worth pointing out from Tracy's article is the following: "Perhaps one exception to the rule of teenage girls comparing themselves to their peers is teenage girls with low self-esteem, a subgroup that often develops eating disorders. These teenage girls tend to compare themselves upward instead of to their peers, a possible subconscious attempt to preserve their negative self-image by comparing themselves to a less attainable ideal." Just an interesting sub-point that I will come back to in another post that highlights the perfectionistic nature that tends to pervade those who suffer from eating disorders. And just for the record, how many teenagers out there don't suffer from negative self-image? That is a post for another day... To read Tracy's article in full, follow this link.