I recently read a book titled “Does This Book Make Me Look Fat? Stories about loving- and loathing- your body” edited by Marissa Walsh, and written by many different authors. In fact, the entire book is a collection of stories from different people who have gone through struggles with the way their body looked and how they dealt with it. Some of the stories I loved, and some I hated.  Some are filled with comedy while others are extremely sad. The great thing about this book is that it really helped me understand what people with certain body image issues are going through.

The very beginning of the book starts with a statistic that states that about 90% of all women worldwide ages 15-64 want to change at least one aspect of their physical appearance- body weight ranking the highest (Walsh, 2). The stories compiled in this book tell of struggles with many body image issues including: feeling self conscious about being overweight, anorexia and other eating disorders, hating the size of their rear-end, and even stories about being uncomfortable with bust size. It has such a wide variety of things that these women have struggled with throughout their lives.

In all honesty, I wouldn’t recommend this book to researchers or practitioners who are trying to help people cope with some of these problems; it’s really not very research based.  However, I would recommend it to parents of teens that may be struggling with some of these issues, and even to the teens themselves. It might help parents understand what their children are going through, and it would definitely help the teens feel like they weren’t so alone in their problems; that there are other people out there who have dealt with the same things.

One great lesson that I got out of the book was to never judge anyone else based on appearances. Many of these women developed their insecurities because of a judgment that someone else made about them. There’s really never a good reason to make someone else feel bad about themselves, and there’s certainly never a good reason to make someone feel bad about something that is completely beyond their own control.  We really have no idea what struggles other people are going through and let’s be honest, we’re all plenty self-conscious without the help of anybody else.

My very favorite quote from the entire book comes from right inside the front cover. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye” – Miss Piggy (disclaimer: I do not actually want to promote giving anyone a black eye).

Reference:

Walsh, M. (2). Take another look. In M. Walsh ,Does This Book Make Me Look Fat?: Stories About Loving and Loathing your Body (p. 2). New York: Harcourt Publishing Company.