Every Monday features a tip, activity, inspiring quote or some other tidbit that helps boost your body image, whether directly or indirectly — and hopefully kick-starts the week on a positive note!

Got a tip for improving body image? Email me at mtartakovsky at gmail dot com, and I’ll be happy to feature it. I’d love to hear from you!

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A few weeks ago I wrote a post about apologizing for your appearance. I talked about the many ways we apologize for our looks and our bodies, with our words and actions.

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Myths about health abound in our society. Health is often confused with dieting, being thin and engaging in punishing exercise. The idea of health is also often used as a way to shame people into restricting their food and hating their bodies.

Today, in part three of our interview, professor, researcher and registered dietician Michelle Neyman Morris reveals more facts about being truly healthy.

Specifically, Morris shares accurate information about Health At Every Size (HAES), valuable resources on nutrition and how readers can distinguish between good science and marketing ploys.

If you haven’t yet, check out part one and part two.

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One of the best parts about writing Weightless is getting to talk to so many different people that are doing amazing work. I love sharing interviews with you, because I love sharing valuable insight and recovery tools.

There’s plenty of inaccurate and damaging information out there, particularly about body image and disordered eating. So I especially like to include interviews that shatter common myths and genuinely offer helpful tips.

Today, I want to highlight some of my older interviews on everything from body image to binge eating to building a healthy relationship with food. I hope you find these helpful!

How One Author Learned to Love Her Body: Q&A with Kim Brittingham (Part 1 and Part 2).

Kim Brittingham wrote a beautiful and heartbreaking memoir called Read My Hips: How I Learned to Love My Body, Ditch Dieting and Live Large. Here, we talk about her book, finding self-acceptance, her favorite body image tips and much more.

I’m honored to be participating in Mara’s Teen Week: Words That Heal, an annual blog series where bloggers reveal their experiences with body image, sexuality, and self-esteem during their teen years.

I’ve talked before about my sad body image as a teen. My negative body image was intertwined with my low self-esteem and shaky sense of self. (Clearly, a winning combination.)

Thankfully, many years later, I’ve learned a thing or two. And I’m in a much healthier place.

Here are the secrets I wish I could’ve shared with my teen self.

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A few days ago, I was writing a piece on body appreciation for Psych Central. I shared activities from a helpful book called Five Good Minutes in Your Body: 100 Mindful Practices to Help You Accept Yourself & Feel At Home in Your Body by  Jeffrey Brantley, M.D., and Wendy Millstine, N.C.

One of their tips is to take a media break. That made me think about how easy it is to spend many minutes or even hours reading women’s magazines and doing other things that damage our body image — including, but not limited to: weighing ourselves, reading diet books, watching shows like The Biggest Loser, and even browsing Facebook. Which can turn into an “everyone is better than me” and “I wish I were thinner, prettier, and …” moment (minute or hour).

It’s amazing to consider all the different things we could be doing instead of worrying about our weight, instead of tearing ourselves down. Even if it’s cleaning the house, it’s better than doing something that chips away at our self-image.

We might not realize it, but we’re deeply influenced by the words we read and the images we see. All these negative influences can leech onto our brains and drive the negative thoughts about our bodies and ourselves.

So, today, let’s talk about the many things we can do instead of spending time on body image stealers (whatever that might be for you). These activities can take a few minutes to a few hours, depending on how much time you have.

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We used to do a post on Psych Central called “Friday Flashback.” (Here’s an example.) Founder and editor-in-chief John Grohol would link to old pieces from as far back as 11 years!

While Weightless is still a newbie — at about 2.5 years old — I love the idea of taking a look back, especially if you’ve just started reading, and these posts may be new to you.

So let’s see what I was writing about in March of 2010 and 2011.

1. A Lesson in Body Image: 50 Amazing Things My Body Helps Me Do.

I spent so many years blaming and bashing my body. Maybe you can relate to thinking a slew of negative thoughts and regularly hurling insults at your appearance. But while we’re criticizing our bodies, we forget all the amazing things they do for us. Don’t get me wrong: Coming up with 50 things was not an easy task. And it took me a while. But it felt ridiculously good to realize just how much I can do and how much I have to be thankful for.

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Today, I’m thrilled to present part one of my interview with Deah Schwartz. Schwartz is the author of the syndicated blog, Dr. Deah’s Tasty Morsels, which focuses on self acceptance, Health At Every Size, developing healthier relationships with food and physical activity and challenging cultural definitions of beauty.

She’s also the co-author of the “Leftovers Workbook/DVD set,” a unique expressive arts therapy curriculum for therapists, and educators training therapists, in the fields of eating disorders and body dissatisfaction.

Below, Schwartz shares her own history with dieting and weight loss and provides insight on making peace with your body.

Q: You received your BA in theater — love that! I’m a huge fan of musicals — so I was wondering what led you to work in the fields of body image and disordered eating?

A: The best way to describe this is to imagine two separate paths that over time grew closer and closer until they finally merged into one.  Theater was a passion of mine both as a spectator and a performer.

Of course as an actor, I was limited in the roles I was considered for by my size and early on began to feel excluded by the typecasting employed by most casting directors.  I was almost always too fat to play a serious romantic role and too thin to play the rare role of Fat Girl Makes Good ala Hairspray.

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For years — and to an extent today — I’ve struggled with an apology addiction. I’d say I was sorry if someone bumped into me, if I had a question, if I had a difference of opinion, if I spoke out of turn.

But more often than not I’d also apologize for my appearance. I wouldn’t explicitly say “I’m sorry for my weight” or “I’m sorry for my looks.” But my behavior would ooze with apology.

Maybe yours did or does, too. Maybe you also don’t specifically utter “I’m sorry,” but your actions scream it.

Last week I published a variety of amazing posts for Body Image Warrior Week. Today, I want to share my post. Happy Friday, and I hope you enjoy the post!

I used to think that in order to love my body or really just tolerate it, I had to be thin. I had to have a flat stomach, small hips and sky-high cheekbones.And I had to earn this love, this tolerance. I had to earn it at the gym — punitively pounding the pavement of a treadmill — and at the dinner table — carefully, nervously watching what I ate.

I used to think that I didn’t deserve to feel good about my body or myself overall because my figure didn’t fit the above criteria. Instead, there was softness and curves and rounder cheeks. And so I wondered and worried, how could I love a body that supposedly didn’t deserve it? I wanted to, but I truly believed — with all of my being — that I wasn’t allowed to. I’m not sure where these prescriptions came from. It was probably a mix of society’s stringent physical standards and my own perspective, a lens colored for so long by a shaky sense of self.

But either way, I felt that I couldn’t enjoy my body until I’d lost weight. Until I did what I came to believe was the exclusive path to body love.

Recently I read a powerful guest post by Rebecca Soule on Anna Guest-Jelley’s beautiful blog Curvy Yoga. Soule wrote a letter to herself on Valentine’s Day. She made the following vow to herself:

“So today, on Valentine’s Day, a day to celebrate love, I celebrate my love for you: for better for worse, in health and happiness, in creaky joints and achy knees, laughter lines and all, this life, this moment, this earth, until my spirit departs from you.”

The part about the creaky joints and achy knees really gave me pause because it refers to loving your body through it all. Through running for miles and through lying on the …

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Our society assumes that shaming is an effective strategy to get people to lose weight, in order to, you know, get healthier and take better care of themselves.

(Not true, of course; you don’t need to lose weight to get healthy; you can just adopt healthy habits.)

That we need to be brutally honest with fat people and stop coddling them. They need to know, in very blunt terms, that they’re too big and too unhealthy.

I’ve gotten comments like this here on Weightless. And while I appreciate a difference of opinion, these comments make me cringe, and they make me frustrated.