Book picks similar to
The Unapologetic Fat Girl's Guide to Exercise and Other Incendiary Acts by Hanne Blank
non-fiction
nonfiction
health
self-help
Fat, Pretty and Soon to Be Old
Kimberly Dark - 2019
Or rather, certain ways. Navigating Kimberly Dark’s experience of being fat since childhood—as well as queer, white-privileged, a gender-confirming “girl with a pretty face,” active then disabled, and inevitably aging—each piece blends storytelling and social analysis to deftly coax readers into a deeper understanding of how appearance privilege (and stigma) function in everyday life and how the architecture of this social world constrains us. At the same time, she provides a blueprint for how each of us can build a more just social world, one interaction at a time. Includes an afterword by Health at Every Size expert, Linda Bacon.
Wake Up, I'm Fat!
Camryn Manheim - 1999
In this New York Times-bestselling inspirational memoir, Camryn Manheim, Emmy Award-winning costar of The Practice, chronicles her journey from a self-hating, "overweight" teenager, who desperately wanted to fit in, to a self-loving, fat activist who is proud to be a misfit. Wake Up, I'm Fat! shares her intelligent, candid, poignant, and often hilarious stories of being fat in a society obsessed with being thin.Camryn takes us from her days as a motorcycle-riding hippie in Santa Cruz to her enrollment at New York University's prestigious school of drama--where Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner broke the unspoken theater rules of size by casting her in the role of the ingenue--and finally to Hollywood, where she dispelled the fallacy that large women can't be portrayed as sensual, sophisticated, and confident.Camryn's endearing honesty, sass, and razor-sharp wit will appeal to any reader who has ever felt like an outcast or yearned to make peace with their body.
Read My Hips: How I Learned to Love My Body, Ditch Dieting, and Live Large
Kim Brittingham - 2011
Kim Brittingham struggled for years with her weight and body image before she learned how to love her self unconditionally, find her confidence, and fully enjoy her life. In this unflinching, humorous, and uplifting memoir, she openly explores her complex relationships with food and dieting, sex and dating, and exercise and health, ultimately inspiring every woman to live life to the absolute fullest, no matter what your jean size.
A Beautiful Work In Progress
Mirna Valerio - 2017
When you meet her on the trail, you might be surprised to see she doesn’t quite fit the typical image of a long-distance runner. She’s neither skinny nor white, and she’s here to show just how misguided these stereotypes can be.In this prejudice-busting, body-positive memoir told with raw honesty, an adventurous spirit, and a sharp sense of humor, Valerio takes readers along on her journey from first-time racer to ultramarathoner and proves that anyone can become a successful athlete.
Feminist Fight Club: An Office Survival Manual for a Sexist Workplace
Jessica Bennett - 2016
Every month, the women would huddle in a friend’s apartment to share sexist job frustrations and trade tips for how best to tackle them. Once upon a time, you might have called them a consciousness-raising group. But the problems of today’s working world are more subtle, less pronounced, harder to identify—and, if Ellen Pao is any indication, harder to prove—than those of their foremothers. These women weren’t just there to vent. They needed battle tactics. And so the fight club was born.Hard-hitting and entertaining, Feminist Fight Club blends personal stories with research, statistics, infographics, and no-bullsh*t expert advice. Bennett offers a new vocabulary for the sexist workplace archetypes women encounter everyday—such as the Manterrupter who talks over female colleagues in meetings or the Himitator who appropriates their ideas—and provides practical hacks for navigating other gender landmines in today’s working world. With original illustrations, Feminist Mad Libs, a Negotiation Cheat Sheet, as well as fascinating historical research and a kit for “How to Start Your Own Club,” Feminist Fight Club tackles both the external (sexist) and internal (self-sabotaging) behaviors that plague today’s women—as well as the system that perpetuates them.
Secrets from the Eating Lab: The Science of Weight Loss, the Myth of Willpower, and Why You Should Never Diet Again
Traci Mann - 2015
And what she has discovered is groundbreaking. Not only do diets not work; they often result in weight gain. Americans are losing the battle of the bulge because our bodies and brains are not hardwired to resist food—the very idea of it works against our biological imperative to survive.In Secrets From the Eating Lab, Mann challenges assumptions—including those that make up the very foundation of the weight loss industry—about how diets work and why they fail. The result of more than two decades of research, it offers cutting-edge science and exciting new insights into the American obesity epidemic and our relationship with eating and food.Secrets From the Eating Lab also gives readers the practical tools they need to actually lose weight and get healthy. Mann argues that the idea of willpower is a myth—we shouldn’t waste time and money trying to combat our natural tendencies. Instead, she offers 12 simple, effective strategies that take advantage of human nature instead of fighting it—from changing the size of your plates to socializing with people with healthy habits, removing “healthy” labels that send negative messages to redefining comfort food.
In the Company of Women: Inspiration and Advice from over 100 Makers, Artists, and Entrepreneurs
Grace Bonney - 2016
In the Company of Women profiles over 100 of these influential and creative women from all ages, races, backgrounds, and industries. Chock-full of practical, inspirational advice for those looking to forge their own paths, these interviews detail the keys to success (for example, going with your gut; maintaining meaningful and lasting relationships), highlight the importance of everyday rituals (meditating; creating a daily to-do list), and dispense advice for the next generation of women entrepreneurs and makers (stay true to what you believe in; have patience). The book is rounded out with hundreds of lush, original photographs of the women in their work spaces.
WomanCode: Perfect Your Cycle, Amplify Your Fertility, Supercharge Your Sex Drive, and Become a Power Source
Alisa Vitti - 2013
Relieved and reborn, she made it her mission to empower other women to be able to do the same.Whether you are suffering from irregular periods, fertility issues, depression, or lack of sex drive, Alisa Vitti says that meds and anti-depressants aren’t the only solutions. Groundbreaking and informative, WomanCode educates women about hormone health in a way that’s relevant and easy to understand. And the five-step protocol can markedly improve health and overall quality of life.Bestselling author and women’s health expert Christiane Northrup, who has called WomanCode the "Our Bodies, Ourselves" of this generation, provides an insightful foreword.
Fat Sex: The Naked Truth
Rebecca Jane Weinstein - 2012
Though our culture is obsessed with both, the two commingling are sometimes seen as offensive, obscene, or even grotesque. Fat people are not viewed as sexual beings. Of course, this perception is far from accurate. Fat people have normal and peculiar sex lives, just like everyone else.A compilation of true stories, cultural references, and narrative commentary, Fat Sex: The Naked Truth, tells the honest, and often heroic, heartbreaking, and hilarious experiences of large-size women and men in their romantic, intimate, and sexual relationships.Subjects touched on include heterosexual relationships, gay men and lesbian women, those who have gained and lost a great deal of weight, and the sexual “underground” such as fetishes. Although the people portrayed in Fat Sex: The Naked Truth sometimes face bigotry and experience shame – they are often valiant and live remarkably fulfilling lives. The stories are compelling and told with sensitivity and wit, connecting people on profoundly important aspects of their lives.This book is not just for large-size people. The stories and issues discussed touch all of us, each and every person who has ever experienced the trials and tribulations, as well as the ecstasies, of intimate relationships.
What's Wrong with Fat?
Abigail C. Saguy - 2012
Experts in the media, medical science, and government alike are scrambling to find answers. What or who is responsiblefor this fat crisis, and what can we do to stop it?Abigail Saguy argues that these fraught and frantic debates obscure a more important question: How has fatness come to be understood as a public health crisis at all? Why, she asks, has the view of fat as a problem-a symptom of immorality, a medical pathology, a public health epidemic-come todominate more positive framings of weight-as consistent with health, beauty, or a legitimate rights claim-in public discourse? Why are heavy individuals singled out for blame? And what are the consequences of understanding weight in these ways?What's Wrong with Fat? presents each of the various ways in which fat is understood in America today, examining the implications of understanding fatness as a health risk, disease, and epidemic, and revealing why we've come to understand the issue in these terms, despite considerable scientificuncertainty and debate. Saguy shows how debates over the relationship between body size and health risk take place within a larger, though often invisible, contest over whether we should understand fatness as obesity at all. Moreover, she reveals that public discussions of the obesity crisis domore harm than good, leading to bullying, weight-based discrimination, and misdiagnoses.Showing that the medical framing of fat is literally making us sick, What's Wrong with Fat? provides a crucial corrective to our society's misplaced obsession with weight.
Invisible: How Young Women with Serious Health Issues Navigate Work, Relationships, and the Pressure to Seem Just Fine
Michele Lent Hirsch - 2018
She did.Sophie navigates being the only black scientist in her lab while studying the very disease, HIV, that she hides from her coworkers.For Victoria, coming out as a transgender woman was less difficult than coming out as bipolar.Author Michele Lent Hirsch knew she couldn't be the only woman who's faced serious health issues at a young age, as well as the resulting effects on her career, her relationships, and her sense of self. What she found while researching Invisible was a surprisingly large and overlooked population with important stories to tell.Though young women with serious illness tend to be seen as outliers, young female patients are in fact the primary demographic for many illnesses. They are also one of the most ignored groups in our medical system--a system where young women, especially women of color and trans women, are invisible.And because of expectations about gender and age, young women with health issues must often deal with bias in their careers and personal lives. Not only do they feel pressured to seem perfect and youthful, they also find themselves amid labyrinthine obstacles in a culture that has one narrow idea of womanhood.Lent Hirsch weaves her own harrowing experiences together with stories from other women, perspectives from sociologists on structural inequality, and insights from neuroscientists on misogyny in health research. She shows how health issues and disabilities amplify what women in general already confront: warped beauty standards, workplace sexism, worries about romantic partners, and mistrust of their own bodies. By shining a light on this hidden demographic, Lent Hirsch explores the challenges that all women face.
Soulful Simplicity: How Living with Less Can Lead to So Much More
Courtney Carver - 2017
For Carver, this constant striving had to come to a stop when she was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis (MS). Stress was like gasoline on the fire of symptoms, and it became clear that she needed to root out the physical and psychological clutter that were the source of her debt and discontent. In this book, she shows us how to pursue practical minimalism so we can create more with less--more space, more time, and even more love. Carver invites us to look at the big picture, discover what's most important to us, and reclaim lightness and ease by getting rid of all the excess things.
Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman
Lindy West - 2016
From a painfully shy childhood in which she tried, unsuccessfully, to hide her big body and even bigger opinions; to her public war with stand-up comedians over rape jokes; to her struggle to convince herself, and then the world, that fat people have value; to her accidental activism and never-ending battle royale with Internet trolls, Lindy narrates her life with a blend of humor and pathos that manages to make a trip to the abortion clinic funny and wring tears out of a story about diarrhea.With inimitable good humor, vulnerability, and boundless charm, Lindy boldly shares how to survive in a world where not all stories are created equal and not all bodies are treated with equal respect, and how to weather hatred, loneliness, harassment, and loss--and walk away laughing. Shrill provocatively dissects what it means to become self-aware the hard way, to go from wanting to be silent and invisible to earning a living defending the silenced in all caps.
The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities
Dossie Easton - 1997
Experienced ethical sluts Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy dispel myths and cover all the skills necessary to maintain a successful and responsible polyamorous lifestyle--from self-reflection and honest communication to practicing safe sex and raising a family. Individuals and their partners will learn how to discuss and honor boundaries, resolve conflicts, and to define relationships on their own terms. "I couldn't stop reading it, and I for one identify as an ethical slut. This is a book for anyone interested in creating more pleasure in their lives . . . a complete guide to improving any style of relating, from going steady to having an extended family of sexual friends." --Betty Dodson, PhD, author of Sex for One
Radical Belonging: How to Survive + Thrive in an Unjust World (While Transforming It for the Better)
Lindo Bacon - 2020
This isn't your personal failing; it means that our culture is failing you.We are in the midst of a cultural moment. #MeToo. #BlackLivesMatter. #TransIsBeautiful. #AbleismExists. #EffYourBeautyStandards. Those of us who don't fit into the "mythical norm" (white, male, cisgender, able-bodied, slender, Christian, etc.)—which is to say, most of us—are demanding our basic right: To know that who we are matters. To belong.Being "othered" and the body shame it spurs is not "just" a feeling. Being erased and devalued impacts our ability to regulate our emotions, our relationships with others, our health and longevity, our finances, our ability to realize dreams, and whether we will be accepted, loved, or even safe.Radical Belonging is not a simple self-love treatise. Focusing only on self-love ignores the important fact that we have negative experiences because our culture has targeted certain bodies and people for abuse or alienation. For marginalized people, a focus on self-love can be a spoonful of sugar that makes the oppression go down. This groundbreaking book goes further, helping us to manage the challenges that stem from oppression and moving beyond self-love and into belonging.