You Can't Judge a Body by Its Cover: 17 Women's Stories of Hunger, Body Shame, and Redemption

What if your hunger—that force that beckons you to the ice cream aisle, and guides your hands to take seconds when you didn't even feel like having firsts—was the misunderstood sage of your body, rattling its cage inside the fortress of your soul? What if your resistance to dieting were actually a message of self-love? What if your body size and shape also held intelligence and protection?

In You Can't Judge a Body by Its Cover, you'll read seventeen stories of women who opened the doors to their souls in therapeutic sessions with David Bedrick: stories of shame and self-love, fear and hope, being small and being big. These are the inside stories of the transformation, from bodies impacted by sexism and racism, rape and harsh criticism, and the deepest hungers for an authentic life. You'll recognize your own pains and abuses, resistance to weight loss, your hungers…and power.

Readers say that this book has the power to:
• Wake you up from the nightmare of shame and self-disgust into a gentler and deeply compassionate sense of self and body.
• Reveal how sexism, female socialization, and internalized oppression are part of your body shame story.
• Reveal what is truly behind women's sense of failure around dieting.
• Free you to see the beauty, power, and wisdom of your body and its hungers.
• Connect you to your own story, as you see yourself in many, if not all, of these women's stories.
• Show you how to make a true self inquiry - one that is wise, compassionate, and without the sense that something in you needs fixing.
• Teach therapists and coaches how to work with clients around issues of weight loss, eating, and body shame.

Get ready to be inspired. Get ready to see everything differently. Get ready to meet the life-changing secrets held within your body's rebellion to living in a society that fetishizes thinness and shames authenticity.