The stories we tell ourselves about our bodies, about our weight, about our worth play a major role in our lives.

If you tell yourself that your weight dictates your worth, and the number isn’t what you want to see, there’s no doubt that the decisions you make in your self-care, relationships and other areas will be negative.

If you tell yourself that you’re weak for eating dessert, you’ll continuing berating yourself every time you eat something sweet — and you might start to see yourself as an utterly, hopelessly weak person.

If you tell yourself that you’re not good enough, you might reject healthy relationships and choose toxic ones.

You might not let yourself relax or have fun or do things that genuinely make you happy — because in your mind the tape that keeps playing over and over is that you don’t deserve these things.

{the awesome More of Me to Love logo}

Yesterday, I introduced you to Jay Solomon, co-founder of the fantastic website More of Me to Love, a positive place that helps people of all shapes and sizes live healthier, more fulfilling lives.

Solomon regularly writes about size acceptance and Health At Every Size. He also writes about religion and popular culture — such as his book The Zen of South Park.

Below, in the second part of our interview, Solomon talks more about weight stigma — and how you can help to fight it! — changing our society’s damaging standards and much more.

I’ve loved the website More of Me to Love for a long time. It’s a positive and inspiring space that provides valuable insight on building a healthier body image and life — for everyone. Its blogs are written by experts who offer tons of helpful tools on everything from nourishing your body to finding movement you love.

So today I’m thrilled to present my interview with its co-founder Jay Solomon. As Solomon says, More of Me to Love is “a place for people of all sizes to learn to love their bodies and themselves.” Along with his wife and team, Solomon has spent three years building this valuable site.

Solomon has studied and written about the importance of rights, respect and acceptance for all people. In addition to writing about religion and popular culture, including his first book, The Zen of South Park, Solomon writes and blogs about Size Acceptance and Health at Every Size to stop discrimination however he can.

Below, he reveals why he started More of Me to Love and clears up the many myths behind Health At Every Size.

(By the way, here’s more info about that picture up top.)

{via etsy}

I have a big problem with both women’s magazines and health publications  because of their shaming and dangerous messages. But I have an even bigger problem with weight-loss and diet commercials — mainly because there’s no escape.

Yes, you can turn off the channel. But lately, these commercials are everywhere. Clearly, these companies have bought more airtime in the hopes of making big bucks over shaming viewers for the New Year, a time our society likes to equate with deprivation and restriction.

That’s why it’s critical to discuss and dissect them. Because instead of questioning ourselves — whether we’re thin enough, whether we need to go on a diet, whether we need to kick up our workouts for weight loss — we need to question these companies and the manipulative, detrimental messages they send.

“Being pregnant is in no way, shape or form an under-the-radar kind of experience. After a certain point, people will notice you. And they will make it clear, each in their own way, that they notice you. That level of exposure can be tough to handle — especially when it’s so body-focused,” according to authors Claire Mysko and Magali Amadei in their great book Does This Pregnancy Make Me Look Fat? The Essential Guide to Loving Your Body Before and After Baby.

People might do everything from asking how much weight you’ve gained (and commenting on whether that’s too much or too little) to asking if you’re having twins to judging what you’re eating to touching your tummy without asking permission.

The best way to deal with all this attention? Create some boundaries!

We’ve all had a pair of those jeans somewhere in our house. Jeans that haven’t fit us for years, but we keep anyway. Thinking, hoping and maybe even praying to fit back into them. Thinking that somehow fitting into them would shift our lives for the better.

In her book Life is a Verb: 37 Days to Wake Up, Be Mindful and Live Intentionally, Patti Digh talks about her high school Levi’s and what they represented.

Over the years they’ve become a symbol, a talisman, an icon of my perfect high school shape, that lean and strong teenage body that ran and hiked and climbed and bicycled everywhere, that simpler shape before broken hearts, sexual harassments, dead parents, business suits, big promotions, missed deadlines, inane meetings, working with mean people, being mean myself, dead friends, terrorist attacks, hydraulic systems failing on planes I happened to be on, and just plain living the overrated adult life.

Digh tried desperately to get into those jeans — to no avail. (Something else I bet we can all relate to.) She felt like an utter failure, despite her successful and fulfilling career, wonderful family, great friends and all-round good life.

{image by Portraits By Lucinda; original here}

Yesterday, I talked about some of my favorite books on body image. Today, I’d like to celebrate my two years of writing Weightless by sharing 10 of my favorite posts from way back when.

By the way, don’t forget to comment on yesterday’s post where you can win a free body image book of your choosing! My treat.

1. 7 Signs Your Body Image is Bruised (and 5 Solutions)

This is the post that started it all.

2. Why it’s Time to Change Our Thinking About Weight: Q&A with Linda Bacon, Part 1 and Part 2

Like I said yesterday, Linda Bacon’s book Health At Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight really had an impact on how I view health. I love the Health At Every Size movement, and in this Q&A Bacon debunks so many pervasive (and egregious) myths about health, weight and dieting.

{via pinterest}

Ever since I started writing Weightless, I’ve learned so much about building a positive body image, ditching dieting, genuinely accepting myself and embracing true health.

While every day is a process, I’m light years away from where I was: deeply dissatisfied with my body, not knowing who I was, thinking thinness would make me a better and happier person and afraid of relinquishing dieting, because left to my own devices, I’d surely devour everything in sight. (Magazines love to make us think this, but it’s so far from reality.)

{via pinterest; originally from here}

In our society, our physical appearance gets top billing. That’s why so many people focus so hard on wanting to be thin or muscular or whatever. We assume that a societally-acceptable appearance will bring us more confidence.

We’ll lose a few pounds and suddenly gain a backbone and a better self-image. We’ll have super-strength self-esteem, impervious to insults, cruel remarks, stress and anything else unpleasant and hurtful.

But we know this idea is pure fairytale. Because how you feel about yourself can’t be dependent on something as fleeting and on-the-surface as body size or weight.

This is the last part of my interview with eating disorder expert Ellen Frankel. Frankel is the co-author of The Diet Survivor’s Handbook: 60 Lessons in Eating, Acceptance and Self-Care and Beyond a Shadow of a Diet: The Therapist’s Guide to Treating Compulsive Eating.

Recently, she published the novel Syd Arthur about one woman’s search for true contentment after years of living by diet rules, calorie counts and scale results.

Below, we talked more about her novel, how readers have reacted and what she’d like people to take away from her book.

What really struck me in this interview was Frankel’s emphasis on how we spend our days (in the second question). Years ago, I spent my days being miserable, bashing my body, feeling guilty about eating, consuming tasteless foods (and still feeling bad) and feeling stressed-out and tense — with a very shaky self-worth.

While I know these thoughts and behaviors aren’t entirely under our control (there’s that complicated combo of genetics, parenting, environment, certain stressors, etc.), we can choose to do something about them. We can toss our scales, stop buying diet foods and cookbooks, engage in physical activities we truly enjoy, learn about healthy ways to alleviate anxiety, and focus our attention on bigger and better things (like our passions, loved ones and the beauty of nature).

If you haven’t read them yet, here’s part one and part two of our interview. I’m incredibly grateful to Frankel for taking the time to share her book and insight with readers!

You can learn more about Ellen Frankel and her work at her website.