Thank you for joining us for episode 491 of Live Happy Now.

Body image has always been a challenge for tweens and teens,

and in the era of influencers and social media, it's become even more challenging.

So this week's guest is here to help us through it.

I'm your host, Paula Phelps, and this week I'm talking with Dr. Charlotte Markey, a best-selling author,

Professor of Psychology, and Chair of the Health Sciences Department at Rutgers University.

Charlotte has devoted much of her career to helping adolescents sort out the complex issue of body image,

and with her new book,

Adultish, she brings her empathetic sensibilities to a slightly older demographic.

Targeting older teens and young adults, Adultish is a friendly and straightforward guide to sorting

through some of the online noise and creating a healthy relationship with one's mind and body. Let's have a listen.

Charlotte, thank you for joining me on Live Happy Now. Thank you so much for having me.

You have a terrific new book. It is very timely. Body image has always been a big topic, but especially

now, it is really something that I think a lot of us need to think more about. And you have been a

champion of this subject for a very long time. And I wanted to find out your origin story.

What made you decide that was your area to focus on for your career? I get asked this a lot.

And sometimes I think, well, I'm a woman living in the world we live in.

And that...

Figure it out yourself. That's it. But I think actually my origin story is a little bit perhaps more

interesting than everyone else's story, just in that I grew up as a dancer. And so there

was a lot of attention focused on body and appearance and being

small and what all that meant as part of being a girl. And so I think it made me more thoughtful

...