Jessamyn Stanley Teaches Us About Loving Every Body

Jessamyn Stanley, author of the Every Body Yoga, deals gracefully with passive aggressive trolls who ask, “what about your health?”

What about your health? Why are you asking such an intimate question? I can google. I know about heart disease and diabetes.

And so Stanley has more than 300,000 devoted Instagram followers and a book at the top of best seller lists at Amazon.

“Right Now I Want to Take Care of This Body”

Stanley has some excellent perspective for people who can’t get past issues of body size.

I’m not really representative of a minority. I’m representative of the majority. If you go to yoga studios, they are much more diverse than what our world shows.

I don’t want to obsess over what it could or couldn’t be. Or what it was, or what it should be. It’s just about what it is.

This refreshing perspective stands in sharp contrast to advice we get from other quarters. Some folks are working hard to whip up more concern about weight and obesity. They get annoyed with us for talking about the factors other than chosen behaviors that drive obesity. Frankly, our culture is already way too obsessed with body image.

Thank you, Jessamyn Stanley, for bringing sane reality into this conversation.

Click here for Stanley’s conversation with Robyn Young on NPR and here for her book.

Jessamyn Stanley, photograph © Jessamyn Stanley / Instagram

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July 16, 2017