The best books to stop worrying about your body

This book was a powerful unlearning of everything I thought I knew about body size.

Aubrey Gordon busts common myths of fatness— losing weight is easy, fat people are unhealthy, we’re in the middle of an obesity epidemic, etc.—with data-driven evidence. While other types of identity-based bias have decreased in the past decade, anti-fat bias has shot up. Many people believe they are simply promoting good health when they are critical of fat people, but in reality, they are participating in a social system that labels thin people as “good” and fat people as “bad.”

This book opened my eyes to the idea that anti-fat bias is a pressing social justice issue, one we should be fighting alongside racism, sexism, ableism, and other systems of oppression. The injustice and toll of anti-fat bias—on everyone— will make you angry enough to take action. 

Fearing the Black Body is a startling expose of how historical racism has shaped today’s fatphobia.

Historian Sabrina Strings offers a rousing account of how fat bodies have been valued differently over time, and why. During the Renaissance, women with plump physiques were the epitome of beauty, but fatness lost its luster when it was linked to Blackness during the 1700s with the expansion of slavery.

The cultural arbiters of the time—popular art, women’s magazines, and the medical establishment—promoted thinness as the new beauty standard for white women, a vehicle for moral superiority over Black women who were stereotyped as plump, greedy, and lazy.

History books are sometimes a drag, but this is a real page turner. It will also make you feel mighty mad about the culturally constructed racist origins of today’s anti-fat bias. 

Hunger speaks to the near-universal experience of women hating their body.

Dr. Roxane Gay writes about how her childhood sexual assault drove her to gain weight to feel unseen and therefore feel safe. As a fat, queer, Black woman, she recounts numerous experiences of harassment and hatred based on intersecting identities.

Hunger is a powerful retelling of the deep cuts inflicted by daily encounters of fatphobia. Hunger demands that we create a world that is more considerate of the realities of the bodies of others at the same time we become more accepting of our own bodies. Dr. Gay’s vivid, honest anecdotes make this book impossible to put down. 

The Body Is Not an Apology is an unflinching argument for making peace with your body.

Body size diversity is just another way humans can differ, but instead, this difference has been weaponized to create hierarchies that dehumanize people of size. The Body Is Not an Apology presents radical self-love as a salve for wounds inflicted by fatphobia. The authors call for radical self-love on a global scale to raise collective compassion and empathy to create a more equitable world.

Beyond dismantling anti-fat bias, this book also has tools for challenging racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, and transphobia. The Body Is Not an Apology reveals how these systems of oppression work together and in similar ways, and how radical self-love is vital for envisioning and working toward a just world.

Virgie Tovar’s The Self-Love Revolution: Radical Body Positivity for Girls of Color is exactly what it sounds like: A toolkit for practicing radical self-love.

Tovar challenges harmful diet culture and beauty culture messaging and teaches readers to spot intersecting sexism and racism in media. She encourages readers to reject cultural messages that promote body hatred, and instead, build lasting body empowerment by silencing our inner critic and moving beyond our body as the basis for our worth.

Every book Tovar has written will rock your paradigms about body size and fatness, but I especially recommend The Self-Love Revolution because it opens a space to truly imagine a world without fatphobia. And it comes with the tools and confidence boost to build that world.