Review: Operation Beautiful

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Tired of watching women pick themselves apart in front of the mirror, Caitlin Boyle scribbled a note on a Post-it – “YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL” – and slapped it on the mirror of a public bathroom. With this one small act, she kick-started a movement. In a matter of days, women were undertaking their own feats of resistance, by posting uplifting notes on gym lockers, diet shakes in supermarkets, and anywhere else a nagging voice of self-criticism might lurk.

Caitlin Boyle is the editor of www.operationbeautiful.com and writes a daily food and fitness blog, www.healthytippingpoint.com. Previously, she served as a contributing columnist for The Wall Street Journal Classroom Edition. She lives in Charlotte, North Carolina.

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Operation Beautiful is an uplifting and heartwarming collection of stories and notes from young girls and women all over the world. Reading through the intimate thoughts of how women look at themselves really hit a nerve with me.

Last Thanksgiving my mother gave me several photo boxes of old letters sent back and forth by my grandparents and written in the late 1930′s and into the early 1940′s. In one letter my grandmother mentions the need to walk and eat less ice cream as she was putting on a few pounds. With this I realized women have been concerned with body image and exercise for, well, forever. The astonishing thing is my grandmother weighed less than 100 pounds when she married my grandfather in 1942; she was about 5’3″ tall.

Women are our own worst critics when it comes to body image. Instead of beating ourselves up for not being a size 2, or for having small breasts, or maybe even thick thighs, we should be raising one another up. We should remind ourselves, and each other that we are all beautiful just the way our creator made us.

Good nutrition and fitness should be about being healthy, not being some cookie cutter image of perceived Hollywood beauty. If we all looked alike the world would be boring indeed. The women within the pages of Operation Beautiful remind you of just that.

I would have no problem recommending Operation Beautiful to anyone, man or woman, boy or girl, young or old. It is a book meant to be loved, embraced, shared, and read over and over again.

Watch an interview with author Caitlin Boyle.

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Disclaimer: Thank you to Gotham Books and Twittermoms for the opportunity to review this book. I received a free copy of Operation Beautiful for the purposes of this review. All opinions are 100% mine and are not edited or influenced by Gotham Books or Twittermoms. Amazon affiliate links used.

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