Emily Stimson has a TOB must read over at CatholicVote about how discovering JP II’s vision of the human person helped her overcome anorexia and negative body image issues:

The Theology of the Body taught me that my body was not some hunk of flesh encasing my soul; it was me. It expressed me. It made me present to the world, enabling me to love and be loved.

It also taught me that those curves I despised were gifts, reflecting my feminine heart and God himself, who nourishes and nurtures his people with more tender care than any mother who nourishes and nurtures her child.

And it helped me see food not as something to be feared, but as a perpetual witness to that nourishing love of God’s. It unlocked the power and beauty of the Eucharist and changed every meal into a natural foreshadowing of One, Holy, Sacrificial Meal.

Perhaps most impressively, it did all that in the first reading.

Read the rest: What the Pope Taught Me About Food, Sex, and God

In her new book These Beautiful Bones: An Everyday Theology of the Body, Emily seeks to have a different conversation about the TOB than we’ve seen in recent years.