More Than A Body

Drs. Lindsay and Lexie Kite know firsthand how hard filtering out media influence is when it comes to self-image. Both struggled as young women to overcome the expectations of body size and shape, but were able to learn to love, appreciate, and reclaim their own bodies, eventually earning their PhDs in body image resilience. The twin sisters founded the nonprofit Beauty Redefined and have made it their mission to help other women see themselves without societal expectations distorting their self-perception. More than a Body is a self-help book focused on going beyond body positivity, showing how a mindset focused on appearance sets women up for insecurities and self-judgement. In this book, they offer an action plan for readers to combat that mindset, and instead learn how the body can be "an instrument, not an ornament," with practical, actionable steps to take when consuming media, exercising, practicing self-reflection and self-compassion, and finding a purpose in life.

"An indispensable resource for women of all ages, this is a guide to help us better connect to ourselves, to value ourselves, to love ourselves, and ultimately, to be ourselves." —Chelsea Clinton Positive body image isn’t believing your body looks good; it is knowing your body is good, regardless of how it looks. How do you feel about your body? Have you ever stayed home from a social activity or other opportunity because of concern about how you looked? Have you ever passed judgment on someone because of how they looked or dressed? Have you ever had difficulty concentrating on a task because you were self-conscious about your appearance? Our beauty-obsessed world perpetuates the idea that happiness, health, and ability to be loved are dependent on how we look, but authors Lindsay and Lexie Kite offer an alternative vision. With insights drawn from their extensive body image research, Lindsay and Lexie—PhDs and founders of the nonprofit Beauty Redefined (and also twin sisters!)—lay out an action plan that arms you with the skills you need to reconnect with your whole self and free yourself from the constraints of self-objectification. From media consumption to health and fitness to self-reflection and self-compassion, Lindsay and Lexie share powerful and practical advice that goes beyond “body positivity” to help readers develop body image resilience—all while cutting through the empty promises sold by media, advertisers, and the beauty and weight-loss industries. In the process, they show how facing your feelings of body shame or embarrassment can become a catalyst for personal growth.

Positive body image isn't believing your body looks good; it is knowing your body is good, regardless of how it looks.

Now You’re Talking! Do you want to be bulletproof at work, secure in your relationship, and content in your own skin? If so, it’s more important than ever to be aware of what your body is saying to the outside world. Unfortunately, most of what you’ve heard from other body language experts is wrong, and, as a result, your actions may be hurting, not helping, you. With sass and a keen eye, media favorite Janine Driver teaches you the skills she used every day to stay alive during her fifteen years as a body-language expert at the ATF. Janine’s 7-day plan and her 7-second solutions teach you dozens of body language fixes to turn any interpersonal situation to your advantage. She reveals methods here that other experts refuse to share with the public, and she debunks major myths other experts swear are fact: Giving more eye contact is key when you’re trying to impress someone. Not necessarily true. It’s actually more important where you point your belly button. This small body shift communicates true interest more powerfully than constant eye contact. The “steeple” hand gesture will give you the upper hand during negotiations and business meetings. Wrong. Driver has seen this overbearing gesture backfire more often than not. Instead, she suggests two new steeples that give you power without making you seem overly aggressive: the Basketball Steeple and the A-OK Two-Fingered Steeple. Happy people command power and attention by smiling just before they meet new people. Studies have shown that people who do this are viewed as Beta Leaders. Alpha leaders smile once they shake your hand and hear your name. At a time when every advantage counts—and first impressions matter more than ever—this is the book to help you really get your message across.

"Belonging has been a formative struggle for me. Like most people with marginalized identities, my experience has taught me that it's hard to be yourself and feel like you belong in a culture that is hostile to your existence. That's why my body of work as a scientist, author, professor, speaker, and advocate for body liberation always comes back to the impact of belonging or not belonging. Radical Belonging is my manifesto, helping us heal from the individual and collective trauma of injustice and support our transition from a culture of othering to one of belonging." —Lindo Bacon Too many of us feel alienated from our bodies. This isn't your personal failing; it means that our culture is failing you. We are in the midst of a cultural moment. #MeToo. #BlackLivesMatter. #TransIsBeautiful. #AbleismExists. #EffYourBeautyStandards. Those of us who don't fit into the "mythical norm" (white, male, cisgender, able-bodied, slender, Christian, etc.)—which is to say, most of us—are demanding our basic right: To know that who we are matters. To belong. Being "othered" and the body shame it spurs is not "just" a feeling. Being erased and devalued impacts our ability to regulate our emotions, our relationships with others, our health and longevity, our finances, our ability to realize dreams, and whether we will be accepted, loved, or even safe. Radical Belonging is not a simple self-love treatise. Focusing only on self-love ignores the important fact that we have negative experiences because our culture has targeted certain bodies and people for abuse or alienation. For marginalized people, a focus on self-love can be a spoonful of sugar that makes the oppression go down. This groundbreaking book goes further, helping us to manage the challenges that stem from oppression and moving beyond self-love and into belonging. With Lindo Bacon's signature blend of science and storytelling, Radical Belonging addresses the political, sociological, psychological and biological underpinnings of your experiences, helping you understand that the alienation and pain you are experiencing is not personal, but human. The problem is in injustice, not you as an individual. So many of us feel wounded by a culture that has alienated us from our bodies and divided us from each other. Radical Belonging provides strategies to reckon with the trauma of injustice; reclaim yourself, body and soul; and rewire your nervous system to better cope within an unjust world. It also provides strategies to help us all provide refuge for one another and create a culture of equity and empathy, one that respects, includes, and benefits from all its diverse peoples. Whether you are transgender, queer, Black, Indigenous or a Person of Color, disabled, old, or fat—or your more closely resemble the "mythical norm"—Radical Belonging is your guidebook for creating a world where all bodies are valued and all of us belong—and for coping with this one, until we make that new world a reality.

An exploration, both personal and deeply reported, of how we learn to eat in today’s toxic food culture. Food is supposed to sustain and nourish us. Eating well, any doctor will tell you, is the best way to take care of yourself. Feeding well, any human will tell you, is the most important job a mother has. But for too many of us, food now feels dangerous. We parse every bite we eat as good or bad, and judge our own worth accordingly. When her newborn daughter stopped eating after a medical crisis, Virginia Sole-Smith spent two years teaching her how to feel safe around food again — and in the process, realized just how many of us are struggling to do the same thing. The Eating Instinct visits kitchen tables around America to tell Sole-Smith’s own story, as well as the stories of women recovering from weight loss surgery, of people who eat only nine foods, of families with unlimited grocery budgets and those on food stamps. Every struggle is unique. But Sole-Smith shows how they’re also all products of our modern food culture. And they’re all asking the same questions: How did we learn to eat this way? Why is it so hard to feel good about food? And how can we make it better?

In an attractive, oversized format, enlivened with illustrations, sidebar quotes, personal accounts, techniques to try, and profiles of leaders in the field, Discovering the Body's Wisdom is a basic resource for well-being and natural health. Body disciplines and therapies have enjoyed phenomenal growth in the past decade, becoming a major alternative to mainstream medicine and traditional psychotherapy. But with more than 100,000 practitioners and dozens of methods available in the United States alone, how can consumers choose the right one for themselves? Mirka Knaster's richly informative guide provides an overview of the principles and theories underlying the major Eastern and Western body therapies, or "bodyways." It shows readers how to befriend their own bodies, getting back in touch with their internal sources of health and wisdom. It also describes more than 75 individual approaches, answering such questions as: How does each therapy work? What can we expect from one session or a series? What are the reasons for selecting this method? How do we find a qualified practitioner? What, if any, are the "consumer-bewares"?

Drug use is widely understood in terms of its subjects, substances and settings. But what happens when these distinctions start to blur? Injecting Bodies in More-than-Human Worlds moves away from a hierarchical conceptualisation of drug use based on its subjects and their objects, offering unique and fresh insights into the complex world of injecting drugs. Focussing on the Deleuzian notion of bodies-in-process, Dennis proposes a new and timely approach to drugs where agency materialises in relation to others – human and not. Using rich, ethnographic data to demonstrate bodies’ in/capacities to act through their relationality, Dennis carefully maps out where bodies are thought, practised, lived and intervened-with: caught in tension between pleasure and addiction, activity and passivity, ‘becoming-other’ and ‘becoming-blocked’, and making and breaking habits. Arguing for a deeper engagement both with how bodies are enacted and with our collective responsibility to bring them together in healthier ways, this volume offers a unique intervention into the sociology of drugs and, more widely, health and illness. It will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as Science and Technology Studies, Sociology and Social Policy, Drugs and Addiction, and Health and Medical Anthropology.