Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight


Linda Bacon - 2008
    Dieting is the problem. A society that rejects anyone whose body shape or size doesn’t match an impossible ideal is the problem. A medical establishment that equates "thin" with "healthy" is the problem. Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight by Linda Bacon, PhD, presents a well-researched, healthy-living manual that debunks the weight myths and translates the latest science into practical advice to help readers forever end their battle with weight.

Just Eat It: How intuitive eating can help you get your shit together around food


Laura Thomas - 2019
    It's part of a movement to give women power and control over our bodies. To free us from restrictive dieting, disordered eating and punishing exercise. To reject the guilt and anxiety associated with eating and, ultimately, to help us feel good about ourselves."Truly life-changing" Dolly Alderton, bestselling author of Everything I Know About LoveThis anti-diet guide from registered nutritionist Laura Thomas PhD can help you sort out your attitude to food and ditch punishing exercise routines. As a qualified practitioner of Intuitive Eating - a method that helps followers tune in to innate hunger and fullness cues - Thomas gives you the freedom to enjoy food on your own terms.There are no rules: only simple, practical tools and exercises including mindfulness techniques to help you recognise physiological and emotional hunger, sample conversations with friends and colleagues, and magazine and blog critiques that call out diet culture.So, have you ever been on a diet? Spent time worrying that you looked fat when you could have been doing something useful? Compared the size of your waistline to someone else's? Felt guilt, actual guilt, about the serious crime of . . . eating a doughnut? You're not alone. Just Eat It gives you everything you need to develop a more trusting, healthy relationship with food and your body.

Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-Being, and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating


Christy Harrison - 2019
    It will turn what you think you know about health and wellness upside down, as Harrison explores the history of diet culture, how it's infiltrated the health and wellness world, how to recognize it in all its sneaky forms, and how letting go of efforts to lose weight or eat "perfectly" actually helps to improve people's health -- no matter their size. Drawing on scientific research, personal experience, and stories from patients and colleagues, Anti-Diet provides a radical alternative to diet culture, and helps readers reclaim their bodies, minds, and lives so they can focus on the things that truly matter.

The F*ck It Diet: Eating Should Be Easy


Caroline Dooner - 2019
    In fact, our bodies are hardwired against it. But each time our diets fail, instead of considering that maybe our ridiculously low-carb diet is the problem, we wonder what’s wrong with us. Why can’t we stick to our simple plan of grapefruit and tuna fish??? Why are we so hungry? What is wrong with us??? We berate ourselves for being lazy and weak, double down on our belief that losing weight is the key to our everlasting happiness, and resolve to do better tomorrow. But it’s time we called a spade a spade: Constantly trying to eat the smallest amount possible is a miserable way to live, and it isn’t even working. So fuck eating like that. In The F*ck It Diet, Caroline Dooner tackles the inherent flaws of dieting and diet culture, and offers readers a counterintuitively simple path to healing their physical, emotional, and mental relationship with food. What’s the secret anti-diet? Eat. Whatever you want. Honor your appetite and listen to your hunger. Trust that your body knows what it is doing. Oh, and don’t forget to rest, breathe, and be kind to yourself while you’re at it.  Once you get yourself out of survival mode, it will become easier and easier to eat what your body really needs—a healthier relationship with food ultimately leads to a healthier you.An ex-yo-yo dieter herself, Dooner knows how terrifying it can be to break free of the vicious cycle, but with her signature sharp humor and compassion, she shows readers that a sustainable, easy relationship with food is possible.Irreverent and empowering, The F*ck It Diet is call to arms for anyone who feels guilt or pain over food, weight, or their body. It’s time to give up the shame and start thriving. Welcome to the F*ck It Diet. Let’s Eat.

Things No One Will Tell Fat Girls: A Handbook for Unapologetic Living


Jes Baker - 2015
    Among the many Things No One Will Tell Fat Girls that you don't want to miss:1. It's Possible to Love Your Body (Today. Now.)2. You Can Train Your Brain to Play Nice3. Your Weight Is Not a Reflection Of Your Worth4. Changing Your Tumblr Feed Will Change Your Life5. Salad Will Not Get You to Heaven6. Cheesecake Will Not Send You to HellWith her trademark wit, honesty, and rallying spirit, veteran blogger and advocate Jes Baker makes the case for embracing a body-positive worldview, changing perceptions about weight, and making mental wellness a priority. Alongside notable guest essayists, Baker calls on all people to reject fat prejudice, fight body-shaming at the hands of marketing and media, and join the life-changing movement with one step: change the world by loving your body. If you're a person with a body, this book is for you.

Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss--And the Myths and Realities of Dieting


Gina Kolata - 2007
    Kolata's account of four determined dieters' progress through a study comparing the Atkins diet to a conventional low-calorie one becomes a broad tale of science and society, of social mores and social sanctions, and of politics and power. "Rethinking Thin" asks whether words like "willpower" are really applicable when it comes to eating and body weight. It dramatizes what it feels like to spend a lifetime struggling with one's weight and fantasizing about finally, at long last, getting thin. It tells the little-known story of the science of obesity and the history of diets and dieting--scientific and social phenomena that made some people rich and thin and left others fat and miserable. And it offers commonsense answers to questions about weight, eating habits, and obesity--giving us a better understanding of the weight that is right for our bodies.

You Have the Right to Remain Fat


Virgie Tovar - 2018
    But after two decades of dieting and constant guilt, she was over it―and gave herself the freedom to trust her own body again. Ever since, she’s been helping others to do the same. Tovar is hungry for a world where bodies are valued equally, food is free from moral judgment, and you can jiggle through life with respect. In concise and candid language, she delves into unlearning fatphobia, dismantling sexist notions of fashion, and how to reject diet culture’s greatest lie: that fat people need to wait before beginning their best lives.

What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat


Aubrey Gordon - 2020
    In What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat, Aubrey Gordon unearths the cultural attitudes and social systems that have led to people being denied basic needs because they are fat and calls for social justice movements to be inclusive of plus-sized people's experiences. Unlike the recent wave of memoirs and quasi self-help books that encourage readers to love and accept themselves, Gordon pushes the discussion further towards authentic fat activism, which includes ending legal weight discrimination, giving equal access to health care for large people, increased access to public spaces, and ending anti-fat violence. As she argues, I did not come to body positivity for self-esteem. I came to it for social justice.By sharing her experiences as well as those of others--from smaller fat to very fat people--she concludes that to be fat in our society is to be seen as an undeniable failure, unlovable, unforgivable, and morally condemnable. Fatness is an open invitation for others to express disgust, fear, and insidious concern. To be fat is to be denied humanity and empathy. Studies show that fat survivors of sexual assault are less likely to be believed and less likely than their thin counterparts to report various crimes; 27% of very fat women and 13% of very fat men attempt suicide; over 50% of doctors describe their fat patients as awkward, unattractive, ugly and noncompliant; and in 48 states, it's legal--even routine--to deny employment because of an applicant's size.Advancing fat justice and changing prejudicial structures and attitudes will require work from all people. What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat is a crucial tool to create a tectonic shift in the way we see, talk about, and treat our bodies, fat and thin alike.

Fat! So?: Because You Don't Have to Apologize for Your Size


Marilyn Wann - 1998
    FAT!SO? weighs in with a more attractive alternative: feeling good about yourself at any weight—and having the style and attitude to back it up. Internationally recognized as a fat-positive spokesperson, Wann has learned that you can be absolutely happy, healthy, and successful...and fat. With its hilarious and insightful blend of essays, quizzes, facts, and reporting, FAT!SO? proves that you can be out-and-out fabulous at any size.

Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia


Sabrina Strings - 2019
    of California, Irvine) explores the historical development of prothin, antifat ideologies deployed in support of Western, patriarchal white supremacy. Beginning in the aesthetic ideals circulated by Renaissance thinkers and artists and bringing her narrative up into the 1990s, Strings charts how white Europeans and Anglo-Americans developed ideals of race and beauty that both explicitly and figuratively juxtaposed slim, desirable white women against corpulent, seemingly monstrous black women. The work is divided into three sections. The two chapters in the first part consider how Renaissance white women and women of color were depicted as plump and feminine, separated by class, yet belonging to the same gender. The second part of the work charts the rise of modern racial ideologies that yoked feminine beauty to Protestant, Anglo-Saxon whiteness. Later chapters and the epilogue consider how Americans normalized the "scientific management" of white women's bodies for the purpose of racial uplift, a project that continued to situate black women as the embodied Other. The author does not address fat from the angle of health or previous attitudes white Europeans held towards corpulence.

Body Kindness: Transform Your Health from the Inside Out—and Never Say Diet Again


Rebecca Scritchfield - 2016
    One indicates happiness, the other tracks how you feel about your body. If you’re like millions of people, the lines do not intersect. But what if they did?This practical, inspirational, and visually lively book shows you how to create a healthier and happier life by treating yourself with compassion rather than shame. It shows the way to a sense of well-being attained by understanding how to love, connect, and care for yourself—and that includes your mind as well as your body.Body Kindness is based on four principles.WHAT YOU DO: the choices you make about food, exercise, sleep, and moreHOW YOU FEEL: befriending your emotions and standing up to the unhelpful voice in your headWHO YOU ARE: goal-setting based on your personal valuesWHERE YOU BELONG: body-loving support from people and communities that help you create a meaningful lifeWith mind and body exercises to keep your energy spiraling up and prompts to help you identify what YOU really want and care about, Body Kindness helps you let go of things you can't control and embrace the things you can by finding the workable, daily steps that fit you best. Think of it as the anti-diet book that leads to a more joyful and meaningful life!

Fat Is a Feminist Issue


Susie Orbach - 1978
    Reflecting on our increasingly diet and body-obsessed society, Susie Orbach's new introduction explains how generations of women and girls are growing up absorbing the eating anxieties around them. In an age where women want to be sexy, nurturing, domestic goddesses, confident at work, and feminine too, the twenty-first-century woman is poorly armed for survival. Never before has the Fat Is A Feminist Issue revolution been more in need of revival.Exploring our love/hate relationship with food, Susie Orbach describes how fat is about so much more than food. It is a response to our social situation; the way we are seen by others and ourselves. Too often food is a source of anguish, as are our bodies. But Fat Is A Feminist Issue discusses how we can turn food into a friend and find ways to accept ourselves for who and how we are. Following the step-by-step guide, and you too can put an end to food anxieties and dieting.

Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works


Evelyn Tribole - 1995
    But the problem is not you, it's that dieting, with its emphasis on rules and regulations, has stopped you from listening to your body. Written by two prominent nutritionists, "Intuitive Eating" focuses on nurturing your body rather than starving it, encourages natural weight loss, and helps you find the weight you were meant to be. Learn: *How to reject diet mentality forever*How our three Eating Personalities define our eating difficulties*How to feel your feelings without using food*How to honor hunger and feel fullness*How to follow the ten principles of Intuitive Eating, step-by-step*How to achieve a new and safe relationship with food and, ultimately, your body With much more compassionate, thoughtful advice on satisfying, healthy living, this newly revised edition also includes a chapter on how the Intuitive Eating philosophy can be a safe and effective model on the path to recovery from an eating disorder.

The Obesity Myth: Why America's Obsession with Weight is Hazardous to Your Health


Paul Campos - 2004
    Every day, we are bombarded with dire warnings about America’'s “obesity epidemic.” Close to half of the adult population is dieting, obsessed with achieving an arbitrary “ideal weight.” Yet studies show that a moderately active larger person is likely to be far healthier (and to live longer) than someone who is thin but sedentary. And contrary to what the fifty-billion-dollar-per-year weight-loss industry would have us believe medical science has not yet come up with a way to make people thin. After years spent scrutinizing medical studies and interviewing leading doctors, scientists, eating- disorder specialists, and psychiatrists, Professor Paul Campos is here to lead the backlash against weight hysteria— -- and to show that we can safeguard our health without obsessing about the numbers on the scale. But The Obesity Myth is not just a compelling argument, grounded in the latest scientific research; it’s also a provocative, wry expose of the culture that feeds on our self-defeating war on fat. Campos will show: * How the nation’s most prestigious and trusted media sources consistently misinform the public about obesity * What the movie industry’s love affair with the “fat suit” tells us about the relationship between racial- and body-based prejudice in America * How the skinny elite—with their “supersized” lifestyles and gas-guzzling SUVs —project their anxieties about overconsumption on the poorer and heavier underclass * How weight-loss mania fueled the impeachment of Bill Clinton In this paradigm-busting read, Professor Campos challenges the conventional wisdom regarding the medical, political, and cultural meaning of weight and brings a rational and compelling new voice to America’s increasingly irrational weight debate.

Body Positive Power: How learning to love yourself will save your life


Megan Jayne Crabbe - 2017
    We believe that our bodies are the problem, but the truth is that our bodies are not the problem. How we've been taught to see them is the problem... it's time for us all to stop believing the lies, and take our power back.Megan's body image issues began when she was five years old. She spent her childhood chasing thinness, and at fourteen found herself spiralling into anorexia. After recovery she spent years dieting, binging, losing and gaining weight. Then she found body positivity, quit dieting, and finally escaped the cult of thin. Now she's determined to let as many people as possible know the truth: that we are all good enough as we are. If you're tired of being at war with your body, then this book is for you.With her inimitable flair, whip-smart wit and kickass attitude, Megan argues for a new way of seeing ourselves, and a world where every body is celebrated. Where there is no such thing as a ‘bikini body diet’ and 97% of women don’t hate the way they look. A powerful call to arms as much as it is inspirational and practical, this book is the life-changing answer you’ve been looking for.