The Good Body

THE STORY: With THE GOOD BODY, Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues , turns her unique eye to the rest of the female form. Whether undergoing botox injections or living beneath burqas, women of all cultures and backgrounds feel compell

The Good Body is a triumphant blend of mordant humor and heartbreak. By turns hilarious and poignant, it’s the story of retired pro-hockey ruffian Bobby Bonaduce, who is stubbornly ignoring a disease that may be killing him. Bobby returns to his hometown and scams his way into university in a misguided attempt to redeem his messy past and lay emotional claim to a son he abandoned 20 years earlier. With this acclaimed novel, Bill Gaston demonstrates yet again that he is one of the best chroniclers of men and sports.

Discover a fresh approach to moving, fueling, and loving your good body well! So many of us feel as though accepting our bodies means abandoning any effort to improve. We look in the mirror and tell ourselves that we are going to love the skin we are in, but most days our inner self-critic is all we can hear. We constantly ask ourselves How can I have a healthy lifestyle that will keep me motivated and inspired? Why does it even matter how I think about my body? Can't I just lose weight and be happy? What is it going to take for me to be content with the way I look, even if I'm not thin? But there is hope! Pursuing the healthiest version of you means learning to love the reflection in the mirror, and Jennifer Wagner understands this all too well. From looking at her today, you wouldn't know that she used to weigh 336 pounds. During her 16-year health and wellness journey, she has felt the deep anguish of torment from peers and strangers, let the scale dictate her moods, and cried herself to sleep all because of her "imperfect" body. But ultimately, Jennifer realized that to overcome the overwhelming negative feelings about her body, she needed to start with her mind and let go of all the expectations of perfection that were keeping her from being the best version of herself. Embark on this journey with Jennifer as your guide and learn to live a life of healthy habits and positive motivation to take care of your good body.

Playwright, author and activist Eve Ensler has devoted her life to the female body—how to talk about it, how to protect and value it. Yet she spent much of her life disassociated from her own body—a disconnection brought on by her father’s sexual abuse and her mother’s remoteness. “Because I did not, could not, inhabit my body or the Earth,” she writes, “I could not feel or know their pain.” But Ensler is shocked out of her distance. While working in the Congo, she is shattered to encounter the horrific rape and violence inflicted on the women there. Soon after, she is diagnosed with uterine cancer and, through months of harrowing treatment, she is forced to become first and foremost a body—pricked, punctured, cut, scanned. It is then that all distance is erased. As she connects her own illness to the devastation of the Earth, her life force to the resilience of humanity, she is finally, fully—and gratefully—joined to the body of the world. Unflinching, generous and inspiring, Ensler calls on us all to embody our connection to and responsibility for the world.

The first book by Matt Morsia, the UK's #1 Fitness Vlogger*** THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER AS SEEN IN BBC ONE'S GLADIATORS TV SERIES AS LEGEND 'Powerfully dispels myths with science and humour - every gym bag deserves a copy' ROSS EDGELY, #1 bestselling author of The Art of Resilience and The World's Fittest Book 'More fitness viewers than Joe Wicks . . . Matt Morsia trained for the Olympics, beat an eating disorder and overcame depression. Now he has published The 24/7 Body, a book based on cutting-edge science which dispels the myths about fad diets and workouts' THE SUN 'Shatters diet myths and clears up a wealth of misinformation' SUNDAY TIMES ______________________________________ Whatever your goals or your level of fitness, this book offers you a plan to make you look and feel great 24/7. I've tried every workout and fad diet so you don't have to. As a former PE teacher, athlete, personal trainer and now one of the biggest fitness YouTubers in the World (a.k.a an absolute weirdo who films themselves doing stuff), the most common question I get from followers and even people in the street is, 'How do I get a body like yours?' People will almost whisper it, as if I'm going to usher them into a dark alleyway and reply with some kind of mystical secret. Like they're expecting to be told that they need to drink 263ml of maple syrup three times a day whilst reading the complete works of Shakespeare to their dog. Other times they seem to want me to reveal a protocol of supplements, with an inference that I must be taking steroids or other drugs, because having a good body without chemicals is now seen by some as almost impossible. It's not. This book is my attempt to shatter all of those myths and give it to you entirely straight. It is about understanding how to live your life in a more healthy, sustainable and happy way-and how to maintain that forever. And I'm not talking about becoming a monk and only eating lettuce. If you want to eat McDonald's, go for it. Eating crappy food doesn't make you fat and by the time you're done with the book you'll understand why. I want to arm you with your own set of tools so that you can tailor my methods and experiences to you and your own unique situation.

What are the reasons for the current epidemic of eating disorders, the increasing obsession with exercise, diet, and cosmetic surgery, the constant exhortations to look and feel good? This engrossing book examines our concern with the "good body" from a wide variety of perspectives, putting it in the contexts of contemporary culture and of ancient ascetic practices of self-denial. A range of experts—psychiatrists, psychologists, literary scholars, historians, a philosopher, a theologian, an anthropologist, and the former director of a center for abused women—join together to discuss why control of our bodies has become so important in contemporary culture and why society must provide its members with more positive ways to define and empower themselves. The authors discuss issues that shed light on current attitudes toward the body, such as the effects of sexual victimization on body image, a report defining the behavior of battered women as a form of maladaptive self-denial, the influence of science on predominant notions of the "good body" (for example, the "biomedical" version of premenstrual syndrome), the legal restrictions on diet pills and supplements, Flannery O'Connor's "celebration of embodiment" in her final novel, Parker's Back, the impact of cultural ideals of masculine beauty on men, and much more.

Botox, bulimia, breast implants: Eve Ensler, author of the international sensation The Vagina Monologues, is back, this time to rock our view of what it means to have a “good body.” “In the 1950s,” Eve writes, girls were “pretty, perky. They had a blond Clairol wave in their hair. They wore girdles and waist-pinchers. . . . In recent years good girls join the army. They climb the corporate ladder. They go to the gym. . . . They wear painful pointy shoes. They don’t eat too much. They . . . don’t eat at all. They stay perfect. They stay thin. I could never be good.” The Good Body starts with Eve’s tortured relationship with her own “post-forties” stomach and her skirmishes with everything from Ab Rollers to fad diets and fascistic trainers in an attempt get the “flabby badness” out. As Eve hungrily seeks self-acceptance, she is joined by the voices of women from L.A. to Kabul, whose obsessions are also laid bare: A young Latina candidly critiques her humiliating “spread,” a stubborn layer of fat that she calls “a second pair of thighs.” The wife of a plastic surgeon recounts being systematically reconstructed–inch by inch–by her “perfectionist” husband. An aging magazine executive, still haunted by her mother’s long-ago criticism, describes her desperate pursuit of youth as she relentlessly does sit-ups. Along the way, Eve also introduces us to women who have found a hard-won peace with their bodies: an African mother who celebrates each individual body as signs of nature’s diversity; an Indian woman who transcends “treadmill mania” and delights in her plump cheeks and curves; and a veiled Afghani woman who is willing to risk imprisonment for a taste of ice cream. These are just a few of the inspiring stories woven through Eve’s global journey from obsession to enlightenment. Ultimately, these monologues become a personal wake-up call from Eve to love the “good bodies” we inhabit.

From the bestselling author of The Vagina Monologues-a powerful, life-changing examination of abuse and atonement. “A triumph of artistry and empathy.” -Naomi Klein “A crucial step forward . . . This is an urgently needed book right now.” -Jane Fonda “Courageous, transformative, and yes-healing.” -Anne Lamott Like millions of women, Eve Ensler has been waiting much of her lifetime for an apology. Sexually and physically abused by her father, Eve has struggled her whole life from this betrayal, longing for an honest reckoning from a man who is long dead. After years of work as an anti-violence activist, she decided she would wait no longer; an apology could be imagined, by her, for her, to her. The Apology, written by Eve from her father's point of view in the words she longed to hear, attempts to transform the abuse she suffered with unflinching truthfulness, compassion, and an expansive vision for the future. Through The Apology Eve has set out to provide a new way for herself and a possible road for others, so that survivors of abuse may finally envision how to be free. She grapples with questions she has sought answers to since she first realized the impact of her father's abuse on her life: How do we offer a doorway rather than a locked cell? How do we move from humiliation to revelation, from curtailing behavior to changing it, from condemning perpetrators to calling them to reckoning? What will it take for abusers to genuinely apologize? Remarkable and original, The Apology is an acutely transformational look at how, from the wounds of sexual abuse, we can begin to re-emerge and heal. It is revolutionary, asking everything of each of us: courage, honesty, and forgiveness.