Winona Dimeo-Ediger

When you’re helping people zip up dresses and watching their reactions to certain items of clothing, you start noticing patterns. Here are four of the phrases I hear most often in the dressing room, and how I wish — oh, how I wish! — I could respond.

Dear Winona,

Maybe you want to downplay an area you’re feeling insecure about, maybe you’re not in the mood to wear eye-catching colors, but that doesn’t mean you have to buy clothes that effectively make you disappear completely.

Stage one: annoyance. Stage five: obsession!

If you’re at an amazing restaurant, eat the amazing food there! Enjoy it! Don’t limit yourself to one bite of expensive entree because you frantically forced down a pound of undressed salad before the bread basket showed up. Eat salad for its own sake. Eat it because you want to eat it, not because you’re trying NOT to eat something else.

At any given moment 43% of Portland residents are chained to something in protest. The other 57% are already in jail for chaining themselves to other things.

"If you’re not married, you’re doomed. This is such a load of BS. Relationship timelines are complicated and unpredictable and unique to each of us. There’s no age that determines your romantic future. Women don’t have an expiration date."

Recently, I challenged myself to something radical: What if I didn't wear makeup for awhile?

5. You start feeling insecure about the distinct lack of rappers in your social circle.

How does that old cliché go? “Love is not a noun, it’s a verb”? Loving your body is a verb. It’s an action — and in many ways it’s a sacred and defiant one.