Body Positive Power: How learning to love yourself will save your life QUOTES

1 " Detoxing is nonsense, it's a complete fallacy that the body needs to detox. Removal of waste products and toxins is a continuous process and we don't need to periodically flush them out. The body does a perfectly good job of eliminating any substances on its own. The entire concept of needing to detoxify, purify, or cleanse your body with these regimes is literally made up by the diet industry to sell us more shit (that doesn't work) to fix our bodies (that don't need fixing). "

― Megan Jayne Crabbe , Body Positive Power: How learning to love yourself will save your life

2 " Hating our bodies is something that we learn, and it sure as hell is something that we can unlearn. "

― Megan Jayne Crabbe , Body Positive Power: How learning to love yourself will save your life

3 " Kate Moss famously said that “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” So I thought I’d put together a little list of things she’s obviously never tried before that taste so much better than buying into an oppressive body ideal could ever feel: Pasta, pizza, mangoes, avocados, doughnuts, peanut butter, sushi, bacon, chocolate cake, lemon cake, any cake really, blueberries, garlic bread, smoked salmon, poached eggs, apples, roast dinners, cookie dough, sweet potatoes, whipped cream, freshly squeezed orange juice, watermelon, gelato, paella, oh and cheese. You’re welcome, Kate! "

― Megan Jayne Crabbe , Body Positive Power: How learning to love yourself will save your life

4 " We can’t see the beauty in everything that we are because we’ve been taught to first see everything that we’re not. "

― Megan Jayne Crabbe , Body Positive Power: How learning to love yourself will save your life

5 " It doesn't really matter how you look in [family holiday] pictures, it just matters that you're there. "

― Megan Jayne Crabbe , Body Positive Power: How learning to love yourself will save your life

6 " It's genius, really: saturate the media with ideal bodies, convince women that they can only be happy if they look like those bodies, sell women products promising to give them those bodies, and when those products don't work, tell the women that it's their fault for not having enough willpower, and sell them more.
If women begin to achieve the current ideal body, change the ideal so that they'll need to keep buying products (that don't work) to attain the impossible. Rinse and repeat. They go home rolling in their billions and we're left with shattered self-esteem, empty bank accounts, wasted years, and useless products, and we still blame ourselves instead of seeing it for the manipulation that it is. And all along the whole thing rests on that one big lie, that your body needs to look a certain way in order for you to be happy. We bought it. We still buy it. "

― Megan Jayne Crabbe , Body Positive Power: How learning to love yourself will save your life

7 " We want absolutely all bodies to be celebrated and idolised, represented and glorified. "

― Megan Jayne Crabbe , Body Positive Power: How learning to love yourself will save your life

8 " I wish for that time back. All that time that was supposed to be about discovering the world and who I was became wasted on making myself smaller and smaller. Imagine if we all stopped expending so much energy on trying to change our bodies. We could do anything we dreamed of. We could get shit done. "

― Megan Jayne Crabbe , Body Positive Power: How learning to love yourself will save your life

9 " There are already millions of places to go if you want to celebrate weight loss. There are countless online spaces dedicated to dieting where you’ll be cheered on every pound of the way. You can still talk about food diaries and dropped dress sizes with 99 percent of the population. Is it really too much to ask that we preserve one space away from it? One part of our lives that diet culture can’t get its hands on? Body positivity is that space. "

― Megan Jayne Crabbe , Body Positive Power: How learning to love yourself will save your life

10 " And if you’re thinking that 26,000 excess deaths associated with being overweight and obese seems like a lot, bear in mind that in the same year 34,000 deaths were associated with being underweight—where are the screaming headlines about that? "

― Megan Jayne Crabbe , Body Positive Power: How learning to love yourself will save your life

11 " The physiological effects of hunger alone stop us from fully engaging in the world and reaching our full potential. Our bodies and brains just don't function properly when they're deprived of nourishment. And since diet culture has been aimed primarily at women for the past 100 years, hunger could be seen as one of the most effective tools for suppressing female advancement. It keeps us thinking about things like waistlines and sugar substitutes rather than the need for social, political, and economic equality. Which is what led Wolf to famously write, "Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history." In other words, we cannot take on the world while we're hungry. "

― Megan Jayne Crabbe , Body Positive Power: How learning to love yourself will save your life

12 " Let's get real about the ideal. It sucks. It doesn't represent us, and it doesn't even try to. It refuses to acknowledge that people of all sizes, shapes, ages, skin colors, genders and abilities exist and are worthy of being seen, heard, and valued. "

― Megan Jayne Crabbe , Body Positive Power: How learning to love yourself will save your life

13 " Obesity research is almost solely funded by the weight-loss industry. Conducting studies is expensive, and government funds don’t even begin to cover them all. Luckily, our good friend the diet industry is there to give millions to studies aiming to prove that fat is killing us, meaning that in turn their sales go through the roof as we all run, terrified, to our nearest weight-loss group. "

― Megan Jayne Crabbe , Body Positive Power: How learning to love yourself will save your life

14 " And besides the physical lengths we go to, the things we willingly inflict upon our bodies, there's an even darker side to our obsession with perfection, and that's what it does to our minds. The real cost of a diet isn't those irritating hunger pangs you have to ignore but the constant preoccupation with food, the never-ending counting and weighing and bargaining that takes up so much mental real estate. The hatred we have for our bodies doesn't stop at our thighs. It takes over our entire self.
It affects our relationships, how we treat others and how we think we deserve to be treated. It seeps into our professional lives, determining what we have the energy to accomplish and the will to aim for. It saps our ambition beyond dropping dress sizes. You can't dream of becoming an artist, an explorer, or a leader when your dreams are occupied by visions of thin. "

― Megan Jayne Crabbe , Body Positive Power: How learning to love yourself will save your life

15 " Without a doubt, what the war on obesity has created the most of is stigma. It has turned fatness into the ultimate moral sin and given the public a medically motivated reason to bully, harass, and discriminate against someone based on their size. "

― Megan Jayne Crabbe , Body Positive Power: How learning to love yourself will save your life

16 " Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history. "

― Megan Jayne Crabbe , Body Positive Power: How learning to love yourself will save your life

17 " When we go to the beach and bare our skin, we’re not there to be visually appealing to others. We’re there to feel the sand, hear the waves, smell the salt, take in the view. We’re there to make memories. The dimples on our thighs or whether another beachgoer disapproves of our size is irrelevant. It’s not why we’re there. Being aesthetically pleasing is not the purpose of our existence. "

― Megan Jayne Crabbe , Body Positive Power: How learning to love yourself will save your life

18 " We need to stop believing that our bodies exist in the world just to be looked at by other people. Our bodies are not objects; we're not inanimate pieces of art hanging in a museum for people to gaze at and critique. "

― Megan Jayne Crabbe , Body Positive Power: How learning to love yourself will save your life

19 " As soon as we were born into a culture that's willing to sacrifice half the population's mental health in order to turn a profit, we were screwed. From day one. "

― Megan Jayne Crabbe , Body Positive Power: How learning to love yourself will save your life

20 " But reserving the right to do whatever you want to your own body isn’t body positivity, it’s body autonomy, and they are two different things. Body autonomy means what you do with your own body isn’t anyone else’s business, which means that anything goes, even diet culture. Body positivity is a much more specific concept based on accepting our bodies as they are and fighting against the forces that tell us we’re not supposed to. It has barriers that keep things like diet culture out, because they go against its very meaning. "

― Megan Jayne Crabbe , Body Positive Power: How learning to love yourself will save your life