Angelina Caruso - A Body to Love: Cultivate Community, Body Positivity, and Self-Love in the Age of Social Media (Dealing With Body Image Issues)

Praise for A Body to Love

A Body to Love is a powerful and refreshing guide to the most important thing we humans need the most, the ability to connect with our authentic selves and with others. Angie has a way of communicating her truth in a way thats vulnerable, authentic, soothing, safe, and empowering. As always, Im blown away by Angies writing, and I am positive that A Body to Love will move so many.

Natalie Rose Allen , MPsy, RP, creator of wakeupandsmel ltherosay.

This book is a powerful and movingtoo many will be able to relate to it. Angies warm voice feels like hearing from a best friend who is sharing the most sticky vulnerable parts of herself, and it encourages you to feel comfortable to share yours too. This book not only acknowledges the harm of media and marketing on our relationship with food and our bodies, it also provides reflective tools and prompts to challenge them. Recovering from diet culture and disordered eating can feel like a lonely, isolating journey. Angies warmth and vulnerability remind readers that they are not alone and that recovery is possible. Anyone who has ever had a complicated relationship with food or their body will benefit from t his book.

Brenna OMalley , registered dietitian and founder of T he Wellful

a body

TO

love

Cultivate Community,

Body Positivity, and Self-Love

in the Age of Social Media

By Angelina Caruso

Coral Gables

Copyright 2021 by Angelina Caruso.
Published by Mango Publishing, a division of Mango Publishing Group, Inc.

Cover & Layout Design: Carmen Fortunato
Cover Art: AdobeStock

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A Body to Love: Cultivate Community, Body Positivity, and Self-Love in the Age of Social Media

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication number: 2021942076
ISBN: (print) 978-1-64250-685-3, (ebook) 978-1-64250-686-0
BISAC category code SEL014000, SELF-HELP / Eating Disorders & Body Image

Printed in the United States of America

To my bodies: past, present, and future.

Im sorry, thank you, and Im excited to meet you.

Contents

There is something incredible about recovering from an eating disorder; its near impossible to put into words. The thing is, Angie is incredible with words. She can encapsulate the essence of freedom from an eating disorder. She has taken the struggles and heartaches from her battle and turned them into a uniquely beauti ful story.

You will read Angies story throughout A Body to Love , how she has been able to heal through her triumphs and pitfalls. This is a unique lens of a journey that now, hundreds of thousands have been able to engage with through social media. Her talent is so apparent through these lessons as she teaches you how to be a conscious consumer by avoiding negative aspects of social media, which is so utterly important in the modern era of t echnology.

As an eating disorder registered dietitian, I met Angie through the social media community she has curated. We became quick friends with similar interests and a mutual sarcastic sense of humor. We have laughed and cried through it all, connecting on both sides of recovery, the healer and th e healing.

You can never win your eating disorder, but you can win recovery.

Sarah Chau, MS, RDN

Before You Read

What follows is the story of when, for some time, I stopped living and feeling. And how I found my way back.

My relationship with my emotions has never been neutral. Ive either felt deeply and forcefully, or not at all, in denial, in fear, on a mission to repress an d pretend.

Hardship has not hardened me; rather, it has softened my edges. Trauma has shown me the power in vulnerability, in surrendering. Why do we wage battle against ourselves? For what purpose? I led a years-long war attacking myself. I grew exhausted. Hating my body was my full-time job. Everywhere I turned, I couldnt escape from my physical form. I believed my body was my enemy.

For years, I starved myself and exercised into oblivion. I harbored a desperate desire to shrink, to go unnoticed, and yet, I wanted to be the best. I wanted praise. I wanted others to notice that I was disciplined or dedicated or the healthiest. I grew obsessed with how I looked and what I ate because I believed these aspects spoke to my worth as a person. This is what I learned from society at large, and more specifically, from my use of social media as a young teenager. I turned to strangers online to define health for me. I scrolled through diet plans and photos of bodies in bathing suits and workout videos, and I felt an unbearable pressure to conform. I made myself sick over this.

Eating disorders are contradictions. They are mental chaos, paradoxes, lives lived in the absence of logic and rationality. I wanted polar opposites at all times. I wanted to be forgotten, and yet I wanted to be idolized. In the deepest trenches of my illness, I despised the body that carried me through my days, not because it was taking up too much space, but because whatever space it was taking up was never good enough. I knew I was unwell. I knew it when I saw stars while trekking up a staircase. I knew it when I slid into the hard plastic seat of a desk in a high school classroom and an electric pain would shoot up my tailbone, spreading like wildfire through my body. I knew it when I would throw my lunch away before heading to my first-period class, or when my childhood clothes would fall off my teenage body into puddles of despair a t my feet.

My eating disorder revealed again and again how rapidly I was approaching a fatal end. A slow heartbeat. Hunger pains rattled, a constant hum and an occasional pang. Everything about the body I saw, the body I owned, I hated. This is how my eating disor der began.

And this is how it ended.

Because I had finally h ad enough.

When I began healing the wounds of my eating disorder, I was told I was in recovery. I was taught that this word defines the journey of moving from sick to healed. That a person in recovery is still in the midst of their illness, deeply buried in the thing that plagues them. That they are in a stage where they can rationally acknowledge the presence of this thing and are working to mend this thing, but they are not yet rid of this thing. Yet. And that is the goal were taught to understand; that this journey is finished when that thing is unlearned, forgotten, stripped out of the very veins it once ran violently through. Forgotten from the brain it once c ontrolled.