by guest blogger Doreen A. Samelson Ed.D., MSCP, author of Feeding the Starving Mind.

Your body image is how your think and feel about your body. Poor body image is common in Western cultures that emphasize perfect young bodies. To improve your body image try the 6 steps of ACCEPT. Use 3 by 5 cards to make ACCEPTance cards for each step of ACCEPT.

Excerpt from The Body Image Workbook

Body image forms gradually, beginning in childhood. Life experiences lead some people to relate to their bodies in positive and satisfying ways, while other people travel a less enjoyable path. The factors that influence body image development can be divided into two basic categories:

1. The historical influences from your past are the forces that shaped how you came to view your appearance in the ways that you do.


2. The current influences are the events and experiences in everyday life that determine how you think, feel, and react to your looks.

Excerpt from The Anorexia Workbook

Mental Volleyball

At this point, you may be wondering if this is about anorexia or sports. Don’t worry—volleyball does relate to anorexia. How? Well, the strategy of volleyball is a great way to describe how you are responding to thoughts about yourself. Imagine that a volley ball match is going on inside your mind. Instead of volleying a ball back and forth, the teams inside your head are volleying thoughts about you.

Excerpt from What's Eating You?

focus

This exercise will help you become more aware of your individuality and understand that who you are inside is the real you.

Every day, we are bombarded with television, radio, and magazine ads that focus on plastic surgery, dieting, clothes, and make-up. The media focus on appearance is so strong that many of us fall into the trap of identifying our outside appearances as the “real” us and forgetting who we really are on the inside.

So how do you focus more on who you are inside? How are you different from everyone else? How do you find the real you? One way is to remember that you are more than your appearance.

by guest blogger Susan Albers, Psy.D., author of 50 Ways to Soothe Yourself Without Food , Eat, Drink, and be Mindful and Eating Mindfully

If you are a mindless eater who is in need of motivation to change your ways, a little movie therapy might just be what you are looking for.

Movies aren't just entertaining. Every now and then a good flick can teach you something important and transform your feelings and actions. This is good news for people who want to eat healthier but need some help getting into the right frame of mind.

How does it work? Consider other movies and documentaries that have made you rethink important social issue. Thank You for Smoking is a parody that makes you ponder the manipulative ways companies market potentially harmful protects to the public. Traffic gives you a peak into the underworld of drugs. Movies like these delve into the impact of harmful substances on the individual. They also illuminates what goes on behind the scene politically. The movies listed below will take you from your kitchen cupboard to farms across the globe.

Excerpt from The Good Eater

As the basket ball team made the four-hour drive to the San Luis Obispo basketball tournament (the biggest tournament of eighth grade), Coach Whitmore entertained us by predicting who we would all be when we grew up: