The Beauty Tax

They say it hurts to be beautiful but I would have never guessed that it hurts like this.

I'm talking, of course, about my wallet. It costs a boatload of money to stay pretty. People blow billions every year on cosmetics and weight loss.

According to an article by InStyle, aggregated data from mint.com reveals that the average women spends $15,000 in her lifetime on makeup alone.

When you add in the gender pay gap, being a woman should basically count as a tax deduction.

I think it's fair to say that women are largely valued for their appearance. When you're valued for your appearance, it seems worth it to spend money to keep up your appearance. 

People made a big fuss about Angelina Jolie's double mastectomy but they don't seem to care as much about her hysterectomy. It's likely because her ovaries haven't made her as much money over the years.

Look. I'm not trying to close down Sephora. You can still wear your favorite brightly colored lipstick and spend $27 on that moisturizer that you really love because, well, makeup is complicated. 

As a coach, I tell my clients it's not the act of doing things like eating kale, exercising regularly, or wearing makeup that betrays your commitment to feminism or even makes you unhealthy, it's HOW you engage with these items. 

I obviously love kale. I wrote a whole blog about it here. I also love exercise. I really love putting lotion on my face. 

The essential work of intuitive eating is trying to learn how to eat to NOURISH your body instead of berating it. 

 When choosing your outfit, your makeup, or even your dietary supplement, focus on taking care of yourself instead of fixing yourself.

There's nothing broken in you so there's nothing to fix. 

Money is an exchange of value. So, if you're trading your hard earned cash, just make sure you're spending it because you know your own worth already. 

Magazine Madness

I only ever did it when I was alone.... 

I'd look both ways before I reached for it or make sure only strangers could see me. 

I was reaching for a magazine. Sometimes Cosmo. Sometimes Self. Sometimes Fitness. 

Funny how something curated and designed for me as a young woman coming into her body felt like a surreptitious affair. 

I always felt embarrassed of how I needed to know how to melt the pounds away in 10 easy moves because I couldn't figure it out on my own. 

Because being successful as a woman means being beautiful but not really trying. It means being smart and powerful in business but not being too bitchy. It means having a wild and crazy sex life but also having a fulfilling and satisfying romantic partnership.

Women's magazines make the elusive feel attainable: 

"10 easy steps to blast off the fat for good"

"Makeup tips to take you from the boardroom to the dance floor"

"Foods to avoid on date night"

The achiever in me chased after this phantom on the cover of the magazine. The woman who somehow had it all together.

Those bright and brilliant headlines offered liberation, the answers, the divine truth. 

If these magazines offered liberation, though, then wouldn't that mean I wasn't already liberated? As a young feminist, I couldn't admit that I needed any guidance from these "girly" magazines. 

Women's magazines are a double-edged sword. They produce content many women love and simultaneously are designed to make us feel like crap so we'll buy products from advertisers. It is a way for women quietly suffering alone to connect in the Sisyphean task of achieving "success" as a strong and liberated young woman. 

I don't buy these magazines anymore. I don't believe the fairy tale anymore. The diets don't work. I can't afford makeup and I think it's pretty well established that Cosmo has no clue how sex works. 

If what you're looking for is liberation, an article that establishes rules for what's hot and what's not doesn't exactly unshackle you. If you're looking for connection to other women, deciding who is best and worst dressed divides you. Sadly, ladies, we're not going to get to the C-level suites by finding the best pencil skirt. 

Break the rules. Call your girlfriends. And be a boss. 

But you don't have to spend another dime on a paper dream. 

If women were men

What if women were men? 

What if you could just wake up and be a tall, strapping, upper-middle-class young man with the world at your feet? 

What if being a CEO of a Fortune 500 company felt like your birthright? What if a six-figure salary was an expectation of whatever field you entered? 

This is the Freaky Friday scenario I've been playing with in my head the past few weeks: imagining a woman waking up and feeling as entitled as a man or having the same access as a man. I mean, seriously, what would a 69 year-old female news anchor on MSNBC even look like? 

Guys, Chris Matthews is almost 70! And not one person is worried about his graying hair or facial lines. Is anybody worried about whether or not he's too old to keep working? Is that the same conversation we're having about Hillary Clinton?

I recently sat down to watch Miss Representation. It's all about how women are represented in the media. The film underlines how women are represented more often as sexy cheeseburgers than as sentient beings with any agency. We'd be a lot better off if more women were aware of this inequality and even better still if we could shift the way the media portrays women. 

The film is smartly done and I strongly encourage you to rent it, buy it, watch it or attend a screening in your area. BUT.... one thing it's missing is this super smart knowledge from Naomi Wolf's book, The Beauty Myth, that I'm about to drop on you: 

"It is often said that we must make fashion and advertising images include us, but this is a dangerously optimistic misunderstanding of how the market works by lowering our self-esteem. If it flatters our self-esteem, it is not effective. Let's abandon this hope of looking to the index fully to include us. It won't, because if it does, it has lost its function. As long as the definition of "beauty" comes from outside women, we will continue to be manipulated by it".

Fo shizzle we need to be AWARE of how images of women in the media affect our outlook and opinions about women. But let's force our eyeballs upon the systemic problem that is the male gaze: 

We buy shizzle because we feel crappy about ourselves. Making us feel crappy about ourselves is an extremely effective marketing strategy. So, we shouldn't look to the people who are always trying to sell us shizzle to feel good about ourselves. 

The bad news is that it's not a chicken or egg scenario. It means, ladies, we have to start feeling good about ourselves to change the media landscape. 

The good news is that Phenomenal Jane is all about making you feel good about yourself.  

Good enough to fight the power or at least enough to change out of that sexy cheeseburger costume. 

For all the Ladies

There is one more principle left in the 10 principles of intuitive eating but I wanted to take a break from your regularly scheduled programming because this lovely Sunday is: 

International Women's Day

I just want to do something special for all the ladies in the world. In fact, it's something that I'm  starting for the next set of 10 blog posts (although issues of gender do not have to be cisgender specific; AKA boys, stay tuned!)

The UN calls this day, "the time to uphold women's achievements, recognize challenges, and focus greater attention on women's right and gender equality to mobilize all people to do their part." 

Even though it's 2015, women still make less money than men in the United States. Despite strides in education, men still dominate higher paying fields including math and science.

Dieting culture affects women and girls the WORST. Who would we, as women, be if we didn't spend time working on our bodies and our beauty? What would we, as women, spend our money on if we didn't have to buy SoulCycle to feel good about ourselves? 

 I run my business for you ladies. I believe more women should stop fixating on getting lean so they can start leaning in. 

Share this blog post with your ladies today. Let's get that gender equality. 

Love Your Body

The 8th principle of Intuitive Eating is "Respect Your Body."

It sounds simple enough but I have to tell you that it's not easy. This one principle is CRITICAL to becoming an intuitive eater. 

I'm probably going to write about 10 million more blog posts about this because believing your body is good enough is really hard. It's especially hard when there's tons of magazines, advertisements, and pictures everywhere reminding us that we need to buy wrinkle cream, botox, a fast car, or McDonalds to be good enough or in order to love life. 

In fact, they made a whole documentary about it. Our culture very much values appearance. This is especially true for women.  When we don't meet the standards, it can be hard to feel good enough. Even if you don't have a diagnosable eating disorder, managing food can be one way to cope with this very human and very normal feeling. 

For me, the process of coming to love my body came from learning to recognize that my body weight was NOT somehow an indicator of my worth or my health.

The idea that your body should look like the cover of some magazine is not only unattainable but not necessarily healthy for your body.  I would argue that the fallacy that we can all fit into one size is one of the worst myths out there. 

Here's the big thing: 

Weight doesn't really matter the most when it comes to your health. 

Socially, we  have conflated the two. And GURRRRRRRRRRRL, (or BOOOOOOOOOOIIIII) do I have some youtube videos for you to watch:

1.  You can be healthy at every size: http://www.bodylovewellness.com/speaking/ 

This video unpacks one of the largest nutrition studies in the world and shows how weight is not a significant factor in health and longevity when people exercise regularly, eat fruits and vegetables, don't smoke, and drink minimally. 

Stop stepping on the scale to measure your "health."  Focus instead on healthy habits. 

2.  BMI is bologna: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlXxoG98urc&noredirect=1

 BMI, or Body Mass Index, is a formula that takes your weight and divides it by your height squared. In this video, Laci Green unpacks how it evolved from a simple formula that was explicitly not to be used as an indicator for health to being co-opted by life insurance companies and the dieting industry. Now, BMI is the rallying cry of people fighting the "obesity epidemic."

I give you these videos because the conversation around weight has bled into the conversation about health and part of learning to love your body is learning to know the difference. Taking care of your body is about listening to it, not berating yourself for being "overweight." 

Because, c'mon, how well has hating your body worked so far?