Written by Bridgett Burrick Brown  As parents, we often approach conversations about body image with the best intentions, hoping to protect our children from a world filled with unrealistic beauty and body image standards. While these efforts often always come from a place of love, they can sometimes cause unintended harm, introducing ideas our children are too young to process or projecting our own insecurities onto them. Body image issues are not innate—they’re learned. Non

Written by Stephanie Voytek Hip bones that stick out of low-rise jeans. Rib lines that run parallel to hollowed cheekbones. Legs that resemble arms. Thong straps that search for fat to grip onto. So many of us Millennial women don’t need to be reminded of the images of heroin chic that informed our body image. In the early 00’s, “heroin chic” became a “thing of the past”, as evidenced by a newer wave of models who carried a whole pound more of fat than their predecessors. Our

Written by Stephanie Voytek Everyone says that I should love my body, but how can I when it feels like it’s changing everyday? Throughout my years as an eating disorder dietitian, so many of my clients have repeated this exact line. Sometimes spoken loudly, sometimes with tears, and sometimes apprehensively waiting for me to tell them that they’re wrong. That loving your body is easy if you just will yourself. Love your body. Love your fat. Fat is normal. Embrace your rolls.

Written by Bridgett Burrick Brown "To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don't need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself." - Thich Nhat Hanh Embracing mindfulness with myself and others is something that is important to me -it's how I discern the kind of person I am in the world, and I always want to be the best version of myself. But as I get older and wiser ;) -the definition of what this means and how I get there is changing. More than ever, finding

written by Bridgett Burrick Brown We are so much more than our beauty. Still, unrealistic beauty ideals, primarily for women, are deeply ingrained in our society, teaching us that our worth is closely tied to our appearance. This leaves women spending enormous amounts of time, energy, and money chasing something that is often impossible. From a very young age, girls are taught how to look, act and exist in the world. The constant media messaging enforces an idealized image of

Written by Brittany Wehrle I’m a dietitian, and when I was going through school I used to believe that you could tell if someone was healthy or not by looking at them. Spoiler alert: I was very, very wrong (and I’m so glad that I have evolved well beyond that old version of myself!) In a world where we get a lot of our health and wellness information from thin, conventionally attractive, energetic, and carefully curated influencers, it makes sense why we believe that healthy

Written by Nikki Heyder Shame is a universal human emotion that we've all experienced at some point in our lives. It's that feeling of discomfort or embarrassment that arises when we feel like we've done something wrong or failed to meet expectations. Oftentimes when I work with clients who have experienced shame they say things like - “I just wanted to sink under the table and disappear” or “I had my hands over my eyes the whole time - I didn’t want them to see me”. While it

Written by Summer Innanen I don’t care if you love your body or think your body is beautiful. Your body is not your power. I want you to not hate it so you can go out and do meaningful things with your life. I want you to know that you don’t have to be attractive to know that you’re worthy and valuable. I’m not going to tell you that you’re perfect because I want you to be ok with imperfection. I want you to be weird, quirky, smart, sassy, bold, be a good listener and speak u

Written by Bend Beauty Bend Beauty and the Beyond Beauty Project are committed to helping improve our self-esteem and confidence around...

Written by Bend Beauty Bend Beauty and the Beyond Beauty Project are committed to helping improve our self-esteem and confidence around...

Written by Bend Beauty Humans, especially women, are constantly receiving messages from the media about how to “turn back the clock,” or what “anti-aging” products to use, and how to achieve “youthful skin.” This terminology reinforces a perception of aging as a negative thing; that it’s something we should fight back against. The collaboration between Bend Beauty and The Beyond Beauty Project is meant to educate and highlight brands who are celebrating aging as a magical th

Entry: August, 31, 2022 When we use beauty, especially "youthful beauty," as the barometer of what tells us if we are beautiful or not, we use our beauty to harm us. There's no beauty fix for not loving yourself. We have been completely brainwashed to keep our aesthetic youth for as long as we can because, unfortunately, "youthful beauty" is our standard for beauty in our society. But what if it isn't? ...or what if it doesn't have to be the standard? What if? Can you stop fo

Written by Dr. Sura Devi Corrigan DC I was scrolling through Instagram and a video got my attention of a man styling a woman’s hair. The woman was by society’s standards very beautiful. I could tell she had a good amount of plastic surgery done and was wearing a lot of make-up. Her self-hatred was loud to me; almost overtaking her. My feeling was that the more she does externally to make herself beautiful, the more she doesn’t like herself internally. I felt for her. I realiz

Written by Carla Hamilton I saw a blazing, pink sunset in the homogenized, shopping complex last night. Spirit alive and saying, “There’s beauty in the mundane, in the cinderblock of box stores and parking lot grids.” You’ll go back to the pyramids and energy vortexes; the blue zone and the places with etheric cities, overhead or inside of glacial mountains. But for today, there is magic right here in the Olive Garden parking lot, and hand-delivered pasta and cheesecake are n

Written by Vicki Stojkovic Regenold “I’m getting free new boobs and a tummy tuck for my 40th birthday. PM me your email address and I will tell you how.” That was my social media post which led to the announcement of my Breast Cancer diagnosis. I was thirty-nine while drying off after a morning shower and noticed my left nipple had sunken in. I turned sideways and lost my breath, noticing the dimpling on the side of my left breast. I crawled back into bed before driving

Written by Jaclyn Willms For years my clients would come to me and say I had too much dessert last night, or I need to work out hard today, or I need you to kick my butt, and the best one yet – I need to have a good workout today because I need to look lean for an event tonight. I started to wonder how many of us work out because we are thankful for the body that we have been gifted with. Who is working out to celebrate what their body can do? Rather than being frustrated a

Excerpted from Ignite Your Light: a Sunrise-to-Moonlight Guide to Feeling Joyful, Resilient, and Lit from Within by Jolene Hart ©2020 Running Press. Your personal energy— a mix of thoughts and feelings, food and movement, people and surroundings that are uniquely yours— shifts across different parts of your day. In the sunrise moments, the earliest parts of your day from about 5 AM to 9 AM, the energy of your mindset, movement, and the way you prepare yourself for the day

Written by Bridgett Burrick Brown from BBP For 23 years, I consciously, deliberately, and sometimes rigorously upheld the image of a model. When I decided to take modeling seriously at nineteen, I had just quit a competitive six-day-a-week dance life - so I was much more athletic than the fashion world wanted me and was told to lose weight immediately. I was also a little shorter than they wanted me, so they told me to lie and say I was an inch taller. - "Everyone lied," they

Written by Lexie & Lindsay Kite, Ph.D. Excerpt from their new book, More Than a Body: Your Body Is an Instrument Not an Ornament "In our doctoral research among eighteen-to thirty-five-year old women and in the online body image course we have offered for several years to girls and women ages fourteen and up, we started with that same simple question: How do you feel about your body? What we’ve found over and over is that when you ask women about their body image — in other w

Written by Marla Boehr Browsing through an array of glossy beauty magazines, strolling the main floor of the local department store, or simply taking a quick scroll through Instagram is a window into our culture’s obsession with youthful beauty ideals. Youthful skin is indeed beautiful – smooth, plump, and supple, it can almost have an otherworldly glow at times. I often caress my young children’s cheeks and simply marvel at their perfect pores. Although it seems like lightye