Verbatim: Lesley Kinzel

Verbatim: Joyce Meyer

"I think a lot of our anguish over our flaws and weaknesses simply comes from trying to impress ourselves with our own perfection."

— Joyce Meyer

Verbatim: Skye Townsend

REMEMBER: Our flaws make us beautifully human. :)
-S

Verbatim: Frances Lockie

"The cultural messages on what is aesthetically pleasing seem to be more and more uniform. Perfection exists in such a tiny Goldilocks-style window (not too fat, not too thin, not too dark, not too pale, not too soft, not too muscular…). But truly beautiful people are not photoshopped. Inspiring music is not auto-tuned. Important art is not precise. We need to remember the appeal of imperfections."

All photos from Corpulent, taken by Leanna Maione.

This spunky, bi-racial woman (she's half Australian and half Indonesian!) from the land down under gave me the inspiration and the light-bulb moment to start our own body acceptance blog. Frances' articles are always (ALWAYS!!!) very brilliantly written, and her stand on body-image issues definitely influences hundereds, if not thousands, of people from all over the globe. Read her awesome blog, Corpulent, and see more of Frances' eye-popping, funky style and wonderfully written articles. :) Prepare to be inspired! ;)


Stacy

Verbatim: X-Men: First Class (Film)

"You want society to accept you, but you can't even accept yourself."

--Erik Lehnsherr (Magneto) to Raven Darkholme (Mystique)

P.S. PROFESSOR CHARLES XAVIER SHOULD'VE BEEN A REAL MAN, MARRIED TO ME. I love him. James McAvoy was perfect for the role. :)

Plump love,

Stacy

Verbatim

It's so absurd how we often choose to alter and change our bodies to fit clothes, norms, and standards when we've been given the liberty and the gift of having everything we need to create and custom-make things in ANY WAY WE WANT that would make the clothes, norms, and standards fit us, AND NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND.

--Stacy Gutierrez

Verbatim: Chocolat (Film)

Listen, here's what I think. I think that we can't go around measuring our goodness by what we don't do... By what we deny ourselves, what we resist, and who we exclude. I think... We've got to measure goodness by what we embrace, what we create, and who we include.

--Père Henri (Chocolat, 2000)

Verbatim: Rae Smith

(from theloveyourselfchallenge.tumblr.com)

Verbatim: Lao

"Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you."

--Lao

Verbatim: Coco Rocha

This is truly worth quoting, specially coming from a model herself.

"You see a model walk down the street and she’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt, no make-up, her hair down, and she looks like a regular girl. For me just to look “natural” in a photo takes two hours of hair and makeup, good lighting, styling and Photoshop—and six hours later, you have the picture. But when I go home, it’s just me with no makeup, pimples, and a pair of a baggy pants. That’s life—the rest is fantasy. We all need to remember that a photo is just what beauty was to one photographer on one day. You can’t compare yourself to those pictures. You are real. Photos are two-dimensional. Beauty is three-dimensional. Your confidence, your personality, your presence—it all adds to what makes you beautiful."

--Coco Rocha

I couldn't agree with her more.

Love yourself radically,
Stacy

Verbatim (#8)

"Weight isn't important the way the magazines make you think it is. I know a girl who just looks at her face in the medicine cabinet mirror and never looks below her shoulders, and she's four or five hundred pounds but she doesn't see all that, she just sees a beautiful face and therefore she thinks she's a beauty. And therefore I think she's a beauty, too, because I usually accept people on the basis of their self-images, because their self-images have more to do with the way they think than their objective-images do. Maybe she's six hundred pounds, who knows. If she doesn't care, I don't."

Andy Warhol

Verbatim (#7)

“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”

Carl Rogers

Verbatim (#6)

Inspiring and brilliant. One of my favorite quotes EVER!

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

--Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of "A Course in Miracles," 1992

Keep lovin' that awesome body,

Stacy

Verbatim (#5)

I wasn't really a fan of J.K. Rowling. (As if it has any bearing on her, but whatever. :P)

But then she said this:

Is ‘fat’ really the worst thing a human being can be? Is ‘fat’ worse than ‘vindictive’, ‘jealous’, ‘shallow’, ‘vain’, ‘boring’ or ‘cruel’? Not to me. (Read the whole journal on her insightful thoughts on fat here.)

And now I'm one more number added to her millions of fans!

Stacy

Verbatim (#4)

Finally! Someone so eloquently and clearly answered my long-time question about why female models in MOST (if not all) ads wear their "O-face" (orgasm face, or more commonly known as the f*ck face) even when the product being advertised doesn't necessarily need to be promoted in such a lusty, sexual way.

Eva Mendez in a Calvin Klein Secret Obsession Perfume ad, 2008

Ever notice how the women in Cosmopolitan magazine so often look like they’re a hair’s breath from an orgasm? This goes for the ads as well as the editorials. Have you ever wondered: hmm, isn’t it sort of weird that a women’s magazine that is itself sold to women and is simultaneously trying to sell things to women should be filled with other women staring out of the pages making the kinds of dull-witted sexyfaces you’d expect them to be making at men whose attentions they were seeking? Why are women being instructed to look at women who are ostensibly looking at invisible men? The magazine is showing you women via the male gaze. The magazine is also training you to see yourself via the male gaze, and to put more currency in how you look to the outside observer, or how you look in a mirror, as opposed to how you look at the world, as a person seeing. The message is that women don’t see; they are only seen. You want a man? You wear these clothes, stand in this posture, make this sexyface: these are the symbols of the straight female. In a heteronormative, male-driven world, this what it means to be beautiful, or at least sexually available.

-- Lesley Kinzel, the brain candy behind The Fatshionista blog

The quote makes perfect sense. Let us all reflect on this, shall we? :)

Stacy

Verbatim (#1)

I really like quoting substantial people with their take on body appreciation/body issues.

This commences a new section of our blog, which I'll simply entitle "Verbatim."

A society where women are applauded for their ability to become smaller, I have realised, is something that poses more danger than I would have imagined. It is thinness, not health, trimness, not intelligence, that is still portrayed as the true measure of success.

-- Helen Dring

Come to think of it, what she said was entirely true. Sad. But true.

More entries coming this week! :)

Stacy