She received both her masters and her doctoral degrees from Harvard Divinity School. She has been writing, researching, and teaching courses in the area of religion, gender, culture, and embodiment for the past 20 years, and is the author of Starving For Salvation: The Spiritual Dimensions of Eating Problems among American Girls and Women (Oxford, 1999) and The Religion of Thinness: Satisfying the Spiritual Hungers Behind Women's Obsession with Food and Weight (Gürze, 2009), as well as scholarly articles and book chapters.