Curvy Women: Reposting from "HUFF POST WOMEN"

JULY 10, 2014

Dear Reader,  

   I came across this article and I thought it was a really good article that I wanted to share with all of my Curvy Woman followers.  I never hear from you but I can see from the numbers that you are out there.  I not only write this for you, or me, I write this for my daughter in hopes that I can stop the change of bad body image that I know that I still struggle with today. 

     I want her to be comfortable in her own skin. She is, it is me that has those old tapes running around in my head.  Saying she is walking that fine line I was walking at her age, that slippery slope I did when I started putting on weight.  I have to say I sometimes slip and say things in a off handed way that I have to ask my husband did I say that in a mean or hurtful way. I don’t want that for her.  If you have read some of my other post you will know that I came from a background of not so good ways of getting one to want to eat in a manner of doing it healthy.  Either not eating at all which in turn makes you a binge eater for lack of eating that you gorge or you sneak food that goes on and on.

     I know some of you are shaking your heads yes and sometimes may be doing that even still today. I will not lie to you and say those habits have all gone away because they have not.  I am not trying to lose weight now it is just happening and I would not recommend doing it my way at all getting ill with a disease is a life altering experience that is an eye opener and hence this blog for book and all this other stuff you never wanted to know about. J   

     So, what ways can we think of to help each other out to make changes for our children?  To make it better so they don’t have to grow up felling less than?  We are not asking people to like or love fat we are just asking them to understand that not all of us can or are skinny or that no matter what we do will ever look like HMMM, (if I use Farrah Fawcett as my example, will it show my age?) okay Kendall Jenner maybe Robin Lawley (Australian Plus Size Model) but I am really Okay with that!!!

     Read this article by Huff Post Women and go to them often they have a lot of good articles.  This one just cried out to this page and to what we talk about.
Till we talk again next time,

Char

Kendall Jenner

Robin Lawley

Huff

Post  WOMEN

'Stop The Beauty Madness' Brands Ads With Brutally Honest Messages

The Huffington Post  | By Amanda Duberman

Posted: 07/08/2014 2:58 pm EDT Updated: 07/08/2014 2:59 pm EDT

It's a psychological itch that the most enlightened, successful and even beautiful women still tend to scratch: if I look better, I am better.

Now one campaign is trying to convince others to break free from that line of thought. The Stop The Beauty Madness campaign wants you to "feel like you've been socked in the gut" when you see its jarringly frank ads, says its founder Robin Rice.

Stop The Beauty Madness is a series of 25 advertisements branded with honest messages that highlight the true "madness" involved in creating and meeting beauty standards. Rice, an author and the founder of Be Who You Are Productions, started the campaign to challenge an internalized belief that a woman's beauty determines her value.

Rather than attempt to fit more diverse types of women into an already narrow definition of beauty, Stop The Beauty Madness questions the value we place on beauty in the first place. "My main mission is to say if women are worried about their weight and their looks to the point that they're not actually putting themselves in the world, then we're missing out on some really extraordinary individuals and some really important conversations we need to be having," Rice told HuffPost. "Women need to be helping the world move in a more beautiful direction -- a genuinely beautiful direction."

Beauty, Rice reminds us, can be both meticulously arranged or totally accidental. And yet, we privilege "effortless" beauty free of the true effort (and anguish) often required to achieve it, while criticizing those who happen to be very thin for succumbing to beauty standards. "Even if you fit the mold, you get in trouble for fitting the mold," Rice said. "You can't win."

This double-edged sword is why Stop The Beauty Madness takes a broad approach, addressing all elements of a woman's appearance from race, to age, to weight, to several at once. "Naturally thin women, or women who choose to work out and have really buff bodies, or elderly women, are not excluded from this conversation. They get their own backlash," Rice said.

The campaign intentionally uses stock photos, the type of images used to illustrate many glossy magazine articles. "We wanted to use what was out there," Rice told HuffPost. "There's not lot of stock photos of African-American women compared to white women. There's not a lot of edgy photographs of women. There were countless pictures of women on scales trying to lose weight. That shapes our conversation," she said.

Attaching a brutally honest inner monologue to an image typically used to sell things -- whether it's a product, a lifestyle, or romance -- reveals their true costs. Ultimately, Rice hopes the campaign will provide a corrective lens for how women perceive certain images.

"We look at beauty magazines and fashion photographs and whether we theoretically believe in them or not, we've seen so many of them and they've been put into exactly the right light and ratio that something inside of us has said 'That's beautiful,'" Rice told HuffPost. "Whether or not we believe in it intellectually, something deeper has set in and we compare ourselves to that."

Changing beauty culture won't happen overnight. But for now, Rice hopes women can rely on themselves not to fall victim to it.

"Maybe the next time you look at a magazine, you may have a split second in which you question whether or not that gets in your head again," said Rice. "We want to create that split second where you think, 'Wait a minute. Do I really believe in this?'"

The campaign also features audio and video series, a slam poetry contest and blogs. See some of the images below and visit Stop The Beauty Madness to see the full campaign.

Jennie Runk

Runk is the star of a May 2013 H&M swimwear campaign that gained widespread media attention for not relegating the gorgeous size 12 model to the "plus-size" pages of their website. In an interview with activist group SPARK, Runk told a young blogger: "I remember often feeling like I should be unhappy with my body, but it was confusing, because I never thought there was anything wrong with it until people started talking about it."

In a piece for the BBC, Runk wrote of her newfound media attention: "This is exactly the kind of thing I've always wanted to accomplish, showing women that it's OK to be confident even if you're not the popular notion of 'perfect.'... There's no need to glamorise one body type and slam another."

Jennifer Lawrence

The famously outspoken "Hunger Games" star has been extremely vocal about resisting diet culture and pressure to be unnaturally thin. "If anybody even tries to whisper the word 'diet,' I'm like, 'You can go f*ck yourself,'" Lawrence said in an interview for the November 2013 UK issue of Harper's Bazaar.

She also hit the nail on the head during a Nov. 7 Q&A with Yahoo! employees. "The world has this idea that if you don't look like an airbrushed perfect model," she said to Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer. "You have to see past it. You look how you look, you have to be comfortable. What are you going to do? Be hungry every single day to make other people happy? That's just dumb."

Lily Myers

Myers' slam poem about body image and disordered eating was awarded Best Love Poem at the 2013 College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational. Her incredible piece speaks for itself.

Nickolay Lamm

Lamm, an artist who works for MyDeals.com, used CDC measurements of an average 19-year-old woman to create a 3-D model which he then Photoshopped to look like a Barbie doll. His images of "normal" Barbie next to the doll sold in stores is truly worrying.

"If we criticize skinny models, we should at least be open to the possibility that Barbie may negatively influence young girls as well," Lamm told the Huffington Post in an email. "Furthermore, a realistically proportioned Barbie actually looks pretty good."

It's awesome to see a man take a stance on these issues, especially considering that many men experience their own body struggles -- often in silence.

Trina Hall

Hall, a Dallas-based yoga instructor, abandoned all dietary restrictions between March and July of this year in order to see how her body changed when she wasn't actively limiting her eating habits -- and how people in her life reacted to her changing shape. The results of her project were not what she expected:

The people who didn't know, who were just with me in my life -- there was no difference that I could tell in the way that they treated me. The difference came in my own perceptions of myself, and I began to treat myself differently. I was very judgmental, and I would look in the mirror and critique myself... I would pick apart my body. Instead of looking at the whole of my body, I would look at different parts and analyze what's wrong with them.

"My most shocking discovery through the process is that I’m afraid of not being loved," Hall wrote in a Jul. 30 blog post. "I noticed the self-talk was that my beauty is only on the surface."

The experience moved Hall to better understand the dialogue happening inside her own head, and inspired her to help other people suffering from poor body image. "I want to empower people to love their bodies... if it's going to start somewhere, it has to start within," she wrote.

Shailene Woodley

Woodley, who was nominated for a Golden Globe for her role in "The Descendants," toldFlavorwire in July:

I saw somebody -- what I thought was me -- in a magazine once, and I had big red lips that definitely did not belong on my face. I had boobs about three times the size they are in real life. My stomach was completely flat. My skin was also flawless. But the reality is that I do not have those lips and my skin is not flawless and I do have a little bit of a stomach. It was not a proper representation of who I am. I realized that, growing up and looking at magazines, I was comparing myself to images like that -- and most of it isn’t real.

Because of her discomfort with how women are constantly Photoshopped and edited on-screen, Woodley doesn't wear makeup to events. What a badass. 

Elena Raouna

Raouna, who was crowned Miss British Beauty Curve 2013, told the Daily Mail: "you don't have to be size zero to be a model, and you can bepretty and plus size at the same time."

The beauty queen hopes to use her platform to inspire young women to be comfortable in their own bodies, regardless of their weight. "My confidence has grown over the years and hopefully I can inspire other plus-size girls to be confident in their own skin," she said.

Kelsey Miller

The Refinery29 staff writer turned to intuitive eating, a practice where you learn to listen to your body's signals and eat accordingly, to help manage her body demons -- and is chronicling her journey on the Internet via the Anti-Diet Project.

"The goal here is not fast weight loss," Miller told the Huffington Post in an email. "It's about creating a healthy, neutralized relationship with food and learning how to be fit and active every day -- but still have a life."

Sheila Pree bright

Pree Bright's photo series "Plastic Bodies"examines how beauty ideals affect women, especially women of color. Her striking images combine doll parts with segments of human bodies, and the discord between the two is startling. She told HuffPost in an email:

American concepts of the “perfect female body” are clearly exemplified through commercialism, portraying “image as everything” and introducing trends that many spend hundreds of dollars to imitate. It is more common than ever that women are enlarging breasts with silicone, making short hair longer with synthetic hair weaves, covering natural nails with acrylic fill-ins, or perhaps replacing natural eyes with contacts.

Even on magazine covers, graphic artists are airbrushing and manipulating photographs in software programs, making the image of a small waist and clear skin flawless. As a result, the female body becomes a replica of a doll, and the essence of natural beauty in popular American culture is replaced by fantasy.

Golda Poretsky

If you've ever doubted that fat can be beautiful too, watch this health coach and fat acceptance activist's video response to a comment on her blog. Poretsky's advice on such a delicate subject is both warm and practical: "One way to see the beauty in more and more people is to literally look for it."

Adele

Adele says she tries not to worry about her body image and doesn't want to be a "skinny minnie."

"The first thing to do is be happy with yourself and appreciate your body -- only then should you try to change things about yourself."

Rebel Wilson

The actress took to Twitter to say, "I'm not trying to be hot. I'm just trying to be a good actress and entertain people."