As a therapist, the issue of aging and appearance comes up a lot in my work. I've spent years with women struggling with eating disorders and body image issues—objectively beautiful women who loathed how they looked and searched for ways to look “better.” Compound the fact that they didn’t like how they looked in their teens and 20s, they find it all the more difficult to like how they look decades later. We are all one day older than yesterday, so how do you dial down the inner critic and obsessiveness about what is inevitable and instead make peace with how you look today as you age?

Isn’t the concept of “anti-aging” a contradiction? Isn’t aging, the fact that we’re still here, a gift? I would think so. We live in a visual culture where industry after industry is targeted toward making us “better” versions of ourselves—in how we feel and how we look. The parade of things we can do or buy to make that happen is led by the quest for youthfulness. As we evolve and........

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