There can be a snide competition between women, where we allow other women to be beautiful …. to a point. Other women can be pretty, as long as they’re not too pretty. A woman can be beautiful, but if she’s also smart, organized, and a great mom? Forget it. We gossip about her and secretly [...]

Like many women, my body size fluctuates. A lifelong emotional eater, I’ve been learning how to meet my needs without food. Sometimes I am more successful with this than others, which explains why my weight can fluctuate by a size.
For years, I was very, very critical of myself for this pattern, beating myself up and [...]

How do you talk about your body? What things do you say about it when you’re with your girlfriends, your female relatives, your daughters? Do you use your words to uplift and celebrate your body? Or do you use your words to pick at, make fun of, shame, loathe, or judge your body?
The obvious targets [...]

Loving your body is primarily an inside job. But we also live in a physical universe. While you are changing the internal environment of your mind, learning to love your body from the inside, it’s just as important to make your external environment as supportive as possible, to love your body from the outside.
Why? Ignoring [...]

Pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding change more than just your daily life:  they also change your body, and your body image. How can you love and embrace your pregnant and postpartum body? Here are 9 tips:
1. Don’t compare your pregnancy to another woman’s. Every pregnancy is different; every baby is different. Here are just some of [...]

Body hatred manifests in our lives as harsh expectations, stringent guidelines and general meanness:  asking too much from our bodies, and then criticizing them when they fall short. Who wants that? The antidote to body hatred is gentleness:  relaxing our expectations so that we can meet our need for a beautiful, healthy body without living [...]

One of the hard things about about accepting our body’s changes is that how we think about ourselves – how we feel in our bodies – doesn’t keep pace with how we look in our bodies. You may still feel 20 on the inside, even though you don’t look 20 on the outside.
At first, we [...]