clipped from www.care2.com

We hear women in dressing rooms, locker rooms, and bedrooms around the world complain about one thing over and over again – their bodies.

To many she never seems thin enough, not like the ultra slender women that strut down fashion runways, are splashed across glossy magazine pages, and star in today's biggest blockbusters.

We are told these women are beautiful. We are told that if we are thin we will be beautiful too. So we strive to attain this thin ideal and along the way destroy our self-esteem and berate ourselves for not measuring up to these unrealistic, not to mention unhealthy, bodies.

Well, it's high time that women break the thin ideal and start embracing a wider (no pun intended) definition of what it means to be beautiful.

We can start by celebrating Fat Talk Free Week, an international 5-day body activism campaign that raises awareness of body image issues and the damaging impact of the thin ideal on women in society.

by focusing on health – not weight or size