Learning Curves: Living Your Life in Full and with Style

Standing up to the morass of diet books and fashion magazines that suggest that thin is beautiful, Weston proclaims that learning to accept her body is a woman's ""one-way ticket to freedom,"" and outlines a series of exercises that aim to inspire women to see their own beauty and acknowledge their unique worth. The fashion and style director of MODE (a magazine for plus-sized women), Weston also shares her own story of coming to terms with a body that's bigger than size 12, along with the recollections of eight other women--including model Kate Dillon and actresses Kim Coles and Camryn Manheim--in a series of vignettes. Many of the women recount memories of starving themselves to fit the popular image of slender beauty and of being labeled ""the fat one"" by classmates, and tell how they overcame their feelings of inadequacy. Weston encourages women to deal with painful memories regarding their body image, to learn to make the best of negative situations, to keep a journal and to treat their bodies in a respectful, loving way. Calling on her years of experience working in the fashion industry, Weston teaches readers how to create a signature style of dress that will reveal their personality, and to build a wardrobe that reflects that style. While the message Weston delivers is both positive and practical, her material is largely a rehash of ideas presented in more depth in other recent size-acceptance books, like Delta Style by Delta Burke and Alexis Lipsitz or Cherie K. Erdman's Live Large! Eight photographs and 9 line drawings. 14-city author tour. (Apr.)