eating-disorders

To lose confidence in one__ body is to lose confidence in oneself.

Women who love themselves are threatening; but men who love real women, more so.

We do not have to spend money and go hungry and struggle and study to become sensual; we always were. We need not believe we must somehow earn good erotic care; we always deserved it. Femaleness and its sexuality are beautiful. Women have long secretly suspected as much. In that sexuality, women are physically beautiful already; superb; breathtaking.Many, many men see this way too. A man who wants to define himself as a real lover of women admires what shows of her past on a woman's face, before she ever saw him, and the adventures and stresses that her body has undergone, the scars of trauma, the changes of childbirth, her distinguishing characteristics, the light is her expression. The number of men who already see in this way is far greater than the arbiters of mass culture would lead us to believe, since the story they need to tell ends with the opposite moral.

A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience.

Men are visually aroused by women's bodies and less sensitive to their arousal by women's personalities because they are trained early into that response, while women are less visually aroused and more emotionally aroused because that is their training. This asymmetry in sexual education maintains men's power in the myth: They look at women's bodies, evaluate, move on; their own bodies are not looked at, evaluated, and taken or passed over. But there is no "rock called gender" responsible for that; it can change so that real mutuality--an equal gaze, equal vulnerability, equal desire--brings heterosexual men and women together.

The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behaviour and not appearance.

The Victorian woman became her ovaries, as today's woman has become her "beauty.

Alice's dinner consisted of one-half cup medium-grain white rice (120 calories), four spears of asparagus (20 calories), and a pat of butter (40 calories). Bones watched as she used her index finger to smear the butter on an asparagus spear. Then she sucked her middle finger, pretending to remove the excess butter. The buttered finger scratched an ankle, and the calories disappeared into her leg warmer."Tricky," he said under his breath.She smiled. "Just good technique.

In her presence, I was reminded again of why I was an anoretic: fear. Of my needs, for food, for sleep, for touch, for simple conversation, for human contact, for love. I was an anoretic because I was afraid of being human. Implicit in human contact is the exposure of the self, the interaction of the selves. The self I'd had, once upon a time, was too much. Now there was no self at all. I was a blank.

HOW do you define a word without concrete meaning? To each his own, the saying goes, soWHYpush to attain an ideal state of being that no two random people will agree isWHERE you want to be? Faultless. Finished. Incomparable. People can never be these, and anyway,WHENdid creating a flawless facade become a more vital goal than learning to love the personWHOlives inside your skin? The outside belongs to others. Only you should decide for you -WHATis perfect.

Recovery is hard. Regret is harder.

Just because your heart is beating, doesn't mean you're alive.

A huge part of recovery and life -is slowing down and accepting the unKNOWN. This is how you get to KNOW __ourself.

Love__he desire to love and be loved, to hold and be held, to give love even if your experience as a recipient has been compromised or incomplete__s the constant on the continuum of hunger, it's what links the anorexic to the garden-variety dieter, it's the persistent pulse of need and yearning behind the reach for food, for sex, for something.

A look of interest, or perhaps doubt, came across his face. "Well," he said, "I'm sure your bulimia was fulfilling some need.

And that__ the problem. When you__ealive, people can hurt you. It__ easier to crawl into a bonecage or a snowdrift of confusion. It__ easier to lock everybodyout.But it__ a lie.

One of the most dangerous myths surrounding eating disorders is that they are a life sentence.

I would not encourage you to go through the sweat, blood, and tears of the recovery process only to reach some kind of mediocre state where you were just __anaging_ the illness. It is possible to live without Ed.