“[Beauty Sick] will blow the top off the body image movement…provocative and necessary.” — Rebellious Magazine An award-winning psychology professor reveals how the cultural obsession with women's appearance is an epidemic that harms women's ability to get ahead and to live happy, meaningful lives, in this powerful, eye-opening work in the vein of Peggy Orenstein and Sheryl Sandberg. Today’s young women face a bewildering set of contradictions when it comes to beauty. They don’t want to be Barbie dolls but, like generations of women before them, are told they must look like them. They’re angry about the media’s treatment of women but hungrily consume the outlets that belittle them. They mock modern culture’s absurd beauty ideal and make videos exposing Photoshopping tricks, but feel pressured to emulate the same images they criticize by posing with a "skinny arm." They understand that what they see isn’t real but still download apps to airbrush their selfies. Yet these same young women are fierce fighters for the issues they care about. They are ready to fight back against their beauty-sick culture and create a different world for themselves, but they need a way forward. In Beauty Sick, Dr. Renee Engeln, whose TEDx talk on beauty sickness has received more than 250,000 views, reveals the shocking consequences of our obsession with girls’ appearance on their emotional and physical health and their wallets and ambitions, including depression, eating disorders, disruptions in cognitive processing, and lost money and time. Combining scientific studies with the voices of real women of all ages, she makes clear that to truly fulfill their potential, we must break free from cultural forces that feed destructive desires, attitudes, and words—from fat-shaming to denigrating commentary about other women. She provides inspiration and workable solutions to help girls and women overcome negative attitudes and embrace their whole selves, to transform their lives, claim the futures they deserve, and, ultimately, change their world.

Teen-aged girls hate their bodies and diet obsessively, or so we hear. News stories and reports of survey research often claim that as many as three girls in five are on a diet at any given time, and they grimly suggest that many are “at risk” for eating disorders. But how much can we believe these frightening stories? What do teenagers mean when they say they are dieting? Anthropologist Mimi Nichter spent three years interviewing middle school and high school girls—lower-middle to middle class, white, black, and Latina—about their feelings concerning appearance, their eating habits, and dieting. In Fat Talk, she tells us what the girls told her, and explores the influence of peers, family, and the media on girls’ sense of self. Letting girls speak for themselves, she gives us the human side of survey statistics. Most of the white girls in her study disliked something about their bodies and knew all too well that they did not look like the envied, hated “perfect girl.” But they did not diet so much as talk about dieting. Nichter wryly argues—in fact some of the girls as much as tell her—that “fat talk” is a kind of social ritual among friends, a way of being, or creating solidarity. It allows the girls to show that they are concerned about their weight, but it lessens the urgency to do anything about it, other than diet from breakfast to lunch. Nichter concludes that if anything, girls are watching their weight and what they eat, as well as trying to get some exercise and eat “healthfully” in a way that sounds much less disturbing than stories about the epidemic of eating disorders among American girls. Black girls, Nichter learned, escape the weight obsession and the “fat talk” that is so pervasive among white girls. The African-American girls she talked with were much more satisfied with their bodies than were the white girls. For them, beauty was a matter of projecting attitude (“’tude”) and moving with confidence and style. Fat Talk takes the reader into the lives of girls as daughters, providing insights into how parents talk to their teenagers about their changing bodies. The black girls admired their mothers’ strength; the white girls described their mothers’ own “fat talk,” their fathers’ uncomfortable teasing, and the way they and their mothers sometimes dieted together to escape the family “curse”—flabby thighs, ample hips. Moving beyond negative stereotypes of mother–daughter relationships, Nichter sensitively examines the issues and struggles that mothers face in bringing up their daughters, particularly in relation to body image, and considers how they can help their daughters move beyond rigid and stereotyped images of ideal beauty.

Explains what makes people love and appreciate their bodies, and offers advice on how we can all do the same.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. ​This handbook synthesizes and analyzes the growing knowledge base on life course health development (LCHD) from the prenatal period through emerging adulthood, with implications for clinical practice and public health. It presents LCHD as an innovative field with a sound theoretical framework for understanding wellness and disease from a lifespan perspective, replacing previous medical, biopsychosocial, and early genomic models of health. Interdisciplinary chapters discuss major health concerns (diabetes, obesity), important less-studied conditions (hearing, kidney health), and large-scale issues (nutrition, adversity) from a lifespan viewpoint. In addition, chapters address methodological approaches and challenges by analyzing existing measures, studies, and surveys. The book concludes with the editors’ research agenda that proposes priorities for future LCHD research and its application to health care practice and health policy. Topics featured in the Handbook include: The prenatal period and its effect on child obesity and metabolic outcomes. Pregnancy complications and their effect on women’s cardiovascular health. A multi-level approach for obesity prevention in children. Application of the LCHD framework to autism spectrum disorder. Socioeconomic disadvantage and its influence on health development across the lifespan. The importance of nutrition to optimal health development across the lifespan. The Handbook of Life Course Health Development is a must-have resource for researchers, clinicians/professionals, and graduate students in developmental psychology/science; maternal and child health; social work; health economics; educational policy and politics; and medical law as well as many interrelated subdisciplines in psychology, medicine, public health, mental health, education, social welfare, economics, sociology, and law.

The only book currently available that focuses and multicultural, cross-cultural and international perspectives of stress and coping A very comprehensive resource book on the subject matter Contains many groundbreaking ideas and findings in stress and coping research Contributors are international scholars, both well-established authors as well as younger scholars with new ideas Appeals to managers, missionaries, and other professions which require working closely with people from other cultures