A letter I didn't know I needed to read

Sometimes you run across a statement that makes you take a deep breath and feel like you found something you needed to hear, even though you didn’t know you needed to hear it. That’s the way I feel about Iris Higgins’ “An Open Apology to All of My Weight Loss Clients” posted in her blog on 07/27/2013

Higgins comes from a different perspective than I do. She’s “New-Agey” enough to invite readers to call her “your fairy angel.” She now works helping clients build self-esteem and empowerment without dieting, but for 3 years she worked at Jenny Craig. The rest of my post is at Body Impolitic

Brenda Oelbaum Goes National with the Goddess at Her Back

Feminist artist Brenda Oelbaum’s use of the Venus of Willendorf as the sculpture made from diet books strikes at the very heart of fear and prejudice toward larger bodies. Now she is bringing her work turning diet books into Venus of Willendorf sculptures onto the larger stage with “a national ad campaign to take down $66 BILLION Diet Industry.” I just posted about it on Body Impolitic. She calls her project “DUMP THE DIETS! a Fight for Freedom from self-loathing.” Brenda’s work shows bravery worthy of a goddess–I adore the picture of her, resolute, nude, surrounded by towering walls of diet books.

Junk Food Addiction and Diet Deprivation: Two Sides of the Same Coin

Two different ways of manipulating people that both end in binge eating. I’ve recently come across articles about the seemingly unrelated topics of engineering food to be addictive and conditioning teenagers to be lifelong dieters. The first common element that struck me was disconnecting the body’s natural relationship with food and turning it into a marketable commodity. More at my Body Impolitic post.