Originally posted at Ms. Magazine.My body is a battleground. I have spent most of my life waging a war on it. I have vivid girlhood memories of my worth being measured by my waist size and numbers on a scale. I was taught that I must “suffer to be beautiful.” This irreconcilable relationship with body and self continued into middle school, as I hid my budding curves; into high school, when I combined starvation, purging, and over exercising; and well into adulthood, including during my pregnancy and postpartum experience.

But I am not alone. I am part of a lineage of women who declared war on themselves, from my great-great grandmother who donned the organ-crushing corset, to my great-grandmother who internalized the Victorian feminine ideal of daintiness and measured each bite meticulously; to my grandmother who cinched her waist with girdles and ate diet pills for lunch; and to my mother who embodied the emaciated silhouette of the 1970s and aerobicized her way into the 1980s and early 1990s with her food-and-exercise diary tucked in her purse.

But this is not just my legacy. This is an experience shared by countless girls and women, beginning at earlier and earlier ages and affecting them well into their later years. This legacy of self-hatred and self-objectification–punctuated by disordered eating, continuous exercise and abusive fat talk–inhibits the path to personal liberation which begins with self-love.

As bell hooks states, these practices are “self-hatred in action. Female self-love begins with self-acceptance.” As the number of girls and women engaged in these destructive habits increases exponentially, campaigns such as Operation Beautiful, Fat Talk Free Week (which began on Monday) and the NOW Foundation’s Love Your Body Day (October 20) are more important than ever to combat the onslaught of voices undermining our personal and collective self-esteem.

While it may all sound simplistic, in my own personal experience I have found that self-affirming rituals such as banishing self-criticism and honoring my body through reverence and celebration to be rewarding and transformative. In fact, I have felt the most beautiful and whole when I have silenced the critic in my own head, limited my level of mediation and engaged in loving practices that allow me to cultivate respect for my body as opposed to deepening my disdain and disappointment. The greatest personal shift occurred with the birth of my son and the understanding that my body was the vehicle for creating, carrying and birthing this miraculous new life. Staring at my new son’s beautiful little body, I wondered why I didn’t regard my body in the same way–miraculous and perfect. I asked myself why I heaped self-loathing on a body that should garner respect and gratitude.

In fact, respect is the connective strand that binds the 20 ways to love your body that Carmen Siering offered in her Love Your Body day post. If we can learn to respect our body, perhaps we can learn to love our bodies over time, and eventually turn that self-love into personal liberation.

Photo from Flickr user crimfants under Creative Commons 2.0.

I’ve heard it a million times…

“I was so sick all week…but (giggling), I lost ten pounds.”

“I’d rather die thin than live fat.”

It’s strange, frightening and altogether not too surprising that girls and women rejoice in weight loss that results from illness and disease.  Most girls and women understand the serious side effects of chronic yo-yo dieting, diet pills, colonics, laxatives, drug-use and over exercise as the torture devices du-jour to pursue insane degrees of thinness. But, the stakes are high and, as a result, too many take the deadly gamble.

Images of thinness have gotten more extreme and a female’s value is wrapped in a stick-thin frame no matter what else she does.  If you’re independent, successful, professional, intelligent and you’re not thin (and attractive, with thin being a means to being considered attractive in this culture), you’re not as valuable as you could be being all those things. And. Thin.

So, when the FDA announced yet another diet pill being pulled off the market, I’m wasn’t at all surprised and I don’t think anyone else is either.

Government health officials are announcing the recall of popular weight loss pill Hydroxycut, after reports of liver damage and other health problems.

Food and Drug Administration officials said Friday the manufacturer of Hydroxycut has launched a nationwide recall of the dietary supplement, used by people trying to shed pounds and by body builders to sharpen their muscles.

Hydroxycut is advertised as made from natural ingredients. It accounts for about 90 percent of the market for weight loss supplements, with sales of about 1 million bottles a year.

Dietary supplements are not as tightly regulated by the government as medications. Manufacturers don’t need FDA approval ahead of time before marketing their products.

I mean, who are we kidding?  It’s not like there isn’t a history of harmful side effects linked to the use of diet pills resulting in recalls.  Think Fen-Phen in 1997.

I don’t think the manufacturers are surprised.  I don’t think the FDA is surprised.  I don’t think the general public is surprised.  I certainly don’t think the users of Hydroxycut are surprised. I mean, really, anytime a pill claims to have the ability to help you lose weight with minimal lifestyle changes such as changing one’s diet significantly and exercising regularly and being able to help you lose wight and/or tone and sculpt your body, you have to take pause.  That’s just weird.  And wrong.

Haven’t we learned that there’s no magic pill or quick fix for anything?  Are we still that obsessed with immediate results and instant gratification that we have ignored the lessons of the past and what our common sense tells us?

Maybe.  But, when the stakes are high logic goes out the window.

Thinness and the pursuit of thinness, no matter how toxic, is glorified in our culture. In fact, the toxic pursuit of thinness and the vile and disturbing results create fascination and stokes the flames of infatuation.

Just this week in Us Magazine’s print version there is yet another article focusing on Lindsay Lohan’s skeletal figure and the claim that she proudly uses Adderall.  Us Magazine’s online version provides the reader with a slide show of Lohan’s “weights ups and downs.” Last week, Star Magazine ran a similar piece focusing on Lohan’s break-up and subsequent weight loss.

Lohan’s weight loss can’t be attributed entirely too her break-up when you consider the sea of images that glorify the cult of thinness and advertisers provide various instruments, pills and potions to make the mirage appear real.

Hydroxcut’s recall is predictable.  Lohan’s severly thin frame is predictable.  The media’s response is predictable.

And, I have no doubt, a new pill will replace Hydroxcut in the same way Fen-Phen was replaced and the cycle will continue until there is some honest dialogue.

Until then, girls and women will put their health on the line for an outrageous aesthetic that is pandered to the masses.

I began my yoga practice in 1996 and knew I had stumbled upon something exhilarating, insightful, challenging and delicious.  There weren’t a lot of yoga studios in 1996 and I had to truly seek out a practice that fit my personality and my needs.  My friend, Marla, led me to Bryan Kest in 1997 and by 1999 I ditched the gym and developed a dedicated and consistent practice with Bryan and Caleb Asch.

My yoga practice was a wonderful constant in a sea of change and chaos.  It also provided a truly unique place to get to know my body in a new way. It was the first time I paid attention to my body’s rhythms and desires without imposing my own expectations and will.  I became more forgiving, more loving and more in tune.

My teachers and my practice inspired me to give up my obsessive tendency to beat my body during a workout and made movement pleasurable, beautiful and loving. My teachers and my practice taught me how to respect and nurture my body, accept my body and, best of all, love my body.

As a person with a past rooted in dieting, obsessing, over exercising and generally abusing my body, this was new and welcomed territory.  The yoga mat had been one of the few places in our media-driven, thin-obsessed and youth-oriented culture that I was not subject to these distorted messages about what I should look like or who I should be.  I could just be.  Sometimes that meant happy, other times sad, often times tired and curled up in child’s posed without judgement and at other times, fierce and energetic.

As yoga became more and more absorbed by the mainstream and yoga studios popped up around town like Stabucks coffee houses, I noticed yoga’s message of unity and acceptance become filtered through the lens of the dominant consciousness and consumerism.  I began making public commentary on these changes in 2003 that I presented at  a variety of conferences and public lectures: Celebrity Yogis: The Intersection of Yoga, the Cult of Personality and Consumerism, Yoga and Popular Culture, McYoga: The Spiritual Diet for Consumer America, Consuming Spirituality and Spiritual Consuming: Capitalizing on Yoga, and the McDonaldization and Commodification of Yoga: Standing at the Intersection of Spiritual Tradition and Consumer Culture.

I was particularly interested in the reproduction of mainstream beauty standards in the pages of yoga magazines. All the models were thin and polished. After examining the mainstreaming of yoga for several years with frustration and sadness, I put down the yoga magazines and withdrew from the increasingly commercialized yoga community that had previously provided me with solace and acceptance and made my practice more personal and, in many ways, made an attempt to safe guard it.

It worked.

Recently, though, I picked up a copy of Yoga Journal and was dismayed to find advertisements for diet pills. I’d noticed more and more corporate ads before I abandoned my subscription but this hit home.  Not only had Yoga Journal succumbed to accepting corporate dollars for products that seemed unrelated to a healthy yogic lifestyle but now they had allowed the ultimate self-esteem crusher to enter: advertisements that reinforced larger cultural messages telling individuals that they must lose wight and that they don’t have to do the work of eating healthy and exercising.

Pop a pill.

In so many ways, the proliferation of ads for diet pills confirmed what I had already known for years: yoga had passed through the filter of the mainstream capitalistic consumer culture, and in passing through that filter, had emerged altered.

Yoga had come out thinner, sleeker, more polished with soy latte in hand, designer yoga bag slung over a lean shoulder and a bottle of diet pills in the belly.

The Miss Bimbo website made headlines back in March 2008.

A website that encourages girls as young as 9 to embrace plastic surgery and extreme dieting in the search for the perfect figure was condemned as lethal by parents’ groups and healthcare experts yesterday.

The Miss Bimbo internet game has attracted prepubescent girls who are told to buy their virtual characters breast enlargement surgery and to keep them “waif thin” with diet pills.

Healthcare professionals, a parents’ group and an organisation representing people suffering anorexia and bulimia criticised the website for sending a dangerous message to impressionable children.

In the month since it opened the site, which is aimed at girls aged from 9 to 16, has attracted 200,000 members. Players keep a constant watch on the weight, wardrobe, wealth and happiness of their character to create “the coolest, richest and most famous bimbo in the world”. Competing against other children they earn “bimbo dollars” to buy plastic surgery, diet pills, facelifts, lingerie and fashionable nightclub outfits.

The website sparked controversy when it was introduced in France, where it attracted 1.2 million players.

Dee Dawson, the medical director of Rhodes Farm Clinic, which treats girls aged from 8 to 18 who suffer eating disorders, said: “This is as lethal as pro-anorexia websites. A lot of children will get caught up with the extremely damaging and appalling messages.”

Susan Ringwood, the chief executive of Beat, an organisation that supports those suffering eating disorders, said that the website could make girls believe that weight and body size manipulation were acceptable.

The Miss Bimbo site was set up by Nicholas Jacquart, a French entrepreneur. He moved to Tooting, South London, recently and with a 30-year-old businessman called Chris Evans set up Ouza Ltd to promote the website in Britain.

From the way it looks, the site has managed to maintain it’s 1.2 million registered users or “Bimbos.” In fact, the site is offering several special promotions for 2009. Upon registering for the site, you can become a trendsetter, a socialite and find the perfect boyfriend. This allows you to become “Queen of the Bimbos.”