The Body Image Project

Check out this testimony from the Body Image Project about how one woman changed her mind about her body. I like it, in part, because it flies in the face of antiquated ideas that body hatred is only a white girl thing. As Ruth Striegel-Moore of Wesleyan and other great researchers have demonstrated, it simply isn’t.

More vids here.
Transcript after the jump.

“We know you’re going to make it cause you’re pretty, you’re thin.” That’s where it all starts. The better you look, the easier it is for you, plain and simple. “How do you stay so thin?” When people start to look at you as ‘how do you stay so thin,’ you don’t want to gain weight. Once you don’t feel good on the outside you start to not feel good on the inside. I used to be real bad. I used to check the scale three or four times a day. Nobody knows that, but I guess they do now. I’ve come a long way. I used to be so psychotic about it. It’s not about changing your body it’s about changing your mind. It’s not about how your body looks, it’s about how you look at your body. It’s all about how you look at it and the level of importance you give to it, so I stopped giving it so much importance. I just wanted to be able to accept it more. My body is strong. I think I’ve put it through a lot. I’m grateful that it’s strong enough to take everything–from the mental to the physical. Every day I say, “Okay, this is me.”