One of the women I coach, a woman of great accomplishment, recently told me, “I feel like a failure as a woman because I am overweight.”
What’s wrong with a society that leaves so many successful women (dare I say most) judging their self-worth based on what they do or do not weigh, regardless of their talents, gifts, and accomplishments?
Did you read what Ashley Judd, who is currently starring in the ABC Drama “Missing”, wrote on the subject, prompted by public reaction to her appearance. She went from a size 2/4 to a 6/8 and the world is all abuzz. She’s incensed and speaking out.
She wrote,
“The Conversation about women happens everywhere, publicly and privately. We are described and detailed, our faces and bodies analyzed and picked apart, our worth ascertained and ascribed based on the reduction of personhood to simple physical objectification. Our voices, our personhood, our potential, and our accomplishments are regularly minimized and muted.”
She nailed it!
“The assault on our body image, the hypersexualization of girls and women and subsequent degradation of our sexuality as we walk through the decades, and the general incessant objectification is what this conversation allegedly about my face is really about.”
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Ellen Shuman is a Life Coach who specializes in empowering people who are working on emotional and binge eating recovery. She is the founder of A Weigh Out & Acoria Eating Disorder Treatment, President of the Binge Eating Disorder Association (BEDA), and Co-Chair of the Academy for Eating Disorders Special Interest Group on “Health at Every Size”, ellen@aweighout.com
