Poorna Bell

On the darkest of nights, I feel my sense of strength burn with the flame of something bigger than myself. It reminds me that things change, because I have made them change. Stronger will change what you think you know about strength and most importantly, empower you to go on your own journey to discover what strength looks like for you. Poorna Bell's journey to get physically strong started with a heavy mattress that needed flipping and the realisation that - following the death of her husband, Rob - she had been relying on the men in her life to take the bins out, carry the luggage and move furniture. Part memoir, part manifesto, in Stronger, Poorna starts a conversation about women's strength and fitness, tapping into the reservoir of mental strength we each have, in a way that has absolutely nothing to do with weight loss. Poorna shares her own story, as well as drawing on research and telling the stories other women who've forged their own path, including grandma marathon runners, Nepalese female mountain guides and businesswomen qualifying as yoga instructors alongside their busy day job. Now a competitive amateur power-lifter who can lift over twice her body weight, Poorna is the strongest she has ever been both physically and mentally. Weightlifting helped her to find the confidence that physical pursuits can amplify - the confidence that has been helping men to succeed in their careers their whole lives - and that women can find too. Doing away with old-fashioned notions and long-held beliefs about strength, Poorna lays out how strength can work for you no matter what your age and goal might be. Regardless of ability or background, whether you're into weightlifting, running, swimming, yoga or don't consider yourself to be sporty at all, strength that is generated from your own graft, personal goals and achievement, is something that no one can take from you.

How I Changed Everything I Thought I Knew About Women's Strength

Stronger

Karolina

Your body is a living thing. It changes, it expands, it keeps you alive, it protects you, it rises up to meet a need when there is one. It doesn't just contain a heart that pumps 2,000 gallons of blood around you a day, or a brain that has 86 billion nerve cells. When you think about all the amazing things your body can do, how efficient a machine it is, the huge potential it contains, that it is capable of fighting off disease, and then you think that our chief preoccupation is how small it is, doesn't it sound laughable?

Slim or skinny people do not have the monopoly on joy around physical movement. And when we teach people that they do, we do untold damage to girls and women of every size that may takes years, if ever, to undo.

We are raised in a world designed to keep you obedient and small, to make you doubt yourself long after the mean comments are uttered. And diet culture needs all of that, because if it wasn’t there, if you removed those shackles, if you let yourself stand tall, if you said that’s enough, you would generate an internal power so vast, so filled with light and dignity and strength, that you wouldn’t need the rubbish they are trying to sell you.

Stronger quotes

Join the club