Adultish: The Body Image Book for Life

“Charlotte Markey, PhD, speaks to those who let dissatisfaction with their bodies gnaw away at their happiness and prevent them from living their best lives.”

Adultish is a comprehensive guide and workbook for learning to embrace your body no matter how it looks or how you wish it looked. In this highly readable compendium, researcher, educator, and multi-book author Charlotte Markey, PhD, speaks to those who let dissatisfaction with their bodies gnaw away at their happiness and prevent them from living their best lives. Her goal is to answer the question of how we can become more comfortable in our own skin, both literally and metaphorically, while improving our mental and physical health.

Although Adultish is intended for and is useful to all ages, it’s geared toward people on the cusp of adulthood, a time of seeking new ways to view ourselves and the world. The book is replete with questionnaires, self-assessments, Q and As, surveys, evidence-based information, quotes from experts, and stories of healing and change from mostly twenty-somethings on how to learn to love our bodies as they are. Stories span genders and ethnicities, include themes of body hatred and parental and societal pressures to be thin, and illustrate how eating disorders and body image distortions take root.  

Markey acknowledges having had her own body image problems, arguing that “most of us go through life carrying a metaphorical backpack on our backs. In it is a large brick of insecurity. There are also sharp stones.” She believes that ”each represents a piece of ourselves we wish we could change.” She defines body image as “how we think and feel about our bodies and our appearance in general,” describes the genetic limitations of reshaping our bodies, explains the importance of embodiment as the deep connection to our physical selves, and offers strategies for embracing and enhancing embodiment.

The book discusses the approaches of body positivity and body neutrality, making a case for both, depending on how much people want to focus on their appearance. One of the book’s major strengths is that it doesn’t set out external rules to follow but inspires people to be themselves in what Ralph Waldo Emerson describes as a “world that is constantly trying to make you something else.”

Including a primer on types of eating disorders and mental health issues that often accompany them, Markey invites readers to dig deep and learn about their feelings while practicing mindful eating. The goal is to become an intuitive eater who also nourishes themselves emotionally. Encouraging introspection as a way to foster health, she helps readers explore their views of what being active and fit mean to them and how they can develop lasting habits that suit them.

Markey provides strategies to ward off pressures to look a certain way from family, friends, and society, especially for women: break away from diet culture, quit viewing food as “good” and “bad,” attune to appetite signals, follow evidence-based nutritional advice, recognize how genetics and metabolism uniquely shape our bodies, “get out from under the influences” of social media, drop the fat talk, stop body comparisons and surveillance, and define beauty for yourself.

Using a biopsychosocial model, she advocates getting sufficient sleep, finding supportive relationships, and practicing self-compassion and humaneness to develop the enduring love we need for ourselves. She ends the book by encouraging readers to be diligent at and patient with learning embodiment and not give up hope they’ll reach their goals. Finally, she asks that as we become healthier, we join with others in creating a culture that esteems and honors our whole being rather than only our outer shells.

Although this book contains little that hasn’t already been said by other authors, its value is that so many of the pieces that contribute to a healthy self-image come together in one accessible volume.