Christine Schoenwald

My swimsuit phobia started in middle school — that breeding ground of body shame and fear. One minute I’m a kid excitedly putting on my pink two-piece and running into the ocean, the next, I’m avoiding any place where people are known to live in their swimsuits and I might be forced to wear one.

There isn't a competition between transgender women and cisgender women on who's the better woman. How you express your womanhood is up to you, as is whether or not you want to express it. It'd be better to widen the definition of a woman rather than limit it.

I’m a survivor — of fat camp. How terrible could a weight-loss camp be? Well, it was bad enough that I’m still dealing with its after-effects decades later.

Anxiety isn't something people choose to experience — it's connected with how their brains see the world.

A new study conducted by Offir Laufer, David Israeli and Rony Paz (of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel) has found that individuals with anxiety see the world differently, and this difference is because of a variance in their brains.

One of the reasons that narcissists are so troubling is their lack of compassion and awareness regarding how their behavior affects other people.

“You’re fat and ugly,” I’d hear, or, “Look at your stomach, it’s disgusting!” This wasn’t a neighborhood bully taunting me on my way to school — this is what I said to myself all day long, well into adulthood.

Now I know that just because I’m fat doesn’t mean that I don’t have moments of fatphobia. My own fatphobia has taught me a lot.

When the formerly fat spoke of their hardships, I didn’t take them seriously. I thought that without the problem of weight, their lives must be perfect.

A sad fact: Many men who are sexually attracted to fat women are ashamed of it. We need to talk about men who want sex with fat women but won't date them.