Megan Jayne Crabbe Quotes

The physiological effects of hunger alone stop us from fully engaging in the world and reaching our full potential. Our bodies and brains just don't function properly when they're deprived of nourishment. And since diet culture has been aimed primarily at women for the past 100 years, hunger could be seen as one of the most effective tools for suppressing female advancement. It keeps us thinking about things like waistlines and sugar substitutes rather than the need for social, political, and economic equality. Which is what led Wolf to famously write, "Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history." In other words, we cannot take on the world while we're hungry.

Detoxing is nonsense, it's a complete fallacy that the body needs to detox. Removal of waste products and toxins is a continuous process and we don't need to periodically flush them out. The body does a perfectly good job of eliminating any substances on its own. The entire concept of needing to detoxify, purify, or cleanse your body with these regimes is literally made up by the diet industry to sell us more shit (that doesn't work) to fix our bodies (that don't need fixing).

I wish for that time back. All that time that was supposed to be about discovering the world and who I was became wasted on making myself smaller and smaller. Imagine if we all stopped expending so much energy on trying to change our bodies. We could do anything we dreamed of. We could get shit done.

Hating our bodies is something that we learn, and it sure as hell is something that we can unlearn.

And besides the physical lengths we go to, the things we willingly inflict upon our bodies, there's an even darker side to our obsession with perfection, and that's what it does to our minds. The real cost of a diet isn't those irritating hunger pangs you have to ignore but the constant preoccupation with food, the never-ending counting and weighing and bargaining that takes up so much mental real estate. The hatred we have for our bodies doesn't stop at our thighs. It takes over our entire self.
It affects our relationships, how we treat others and how we think we deserve to be treated. It seeps into our professional lives, determining what we have the energy to accomplish and the will to aim for. It saps our ambition beyond dropping dress sizes. You can't dream of becoming an artist, an explorer, or a leader when your dreams are occupied by visions of thin.

It's genius, really: saturate the media with ideal bodies, convince women that they can only be happy if they look like those bodies, sell women products promising to give them those bodies, and when those products don't work, tell the women that it's their fault for not having enough willpower, and sell them more.
If women begin to achieve the current ideal body, change the ideal so that they'll need to keep buying products (that don't work) to attain the impossible. Rinse and repeat. They go home rolling in their billions and we're left with shattered self-esteem, empty bank accounts, wasted years, and useless products, and we still blame ourselves instead of seeing it for the manipulation that it is. And all along the whole thing rests on that one big lie, that your body needs to look a certain way in order for you to be happy. We bought it. We still buy it.

We need to stop believing that our bodies exist in the world just to be looked at by other people. Our bodies are not objects; we're not inanimate pieces of art hanging in a museum for people to gaze at and critique.

We want absolutely all bodies to be celebrated and idolised, represented and glorified.

We can't see the beauty in everything that we are because we've been taught to first see everything that we're not.