The Body Is Not an Apology

I love this book and recommend it to people struggling with negative body image.

Sonya Renee Taylor teaches that we are all connected and that self-judgment in one person extends to the judgment of all people. I found myself digging deeply into the roots of any critical views that I might have held of my own body and then challenging them. Ultimately, it helped me embrace body neutrality and, ultimately, body liberation.

As someone living in a bigger body, it has taken a lot of active reframing and rewiring to learn to love my body. This book was a huge resource for me in that process. This book introduced me to the concept of “radical self-love” and helped me see some of how I was subconsciously (and consciously) believing that my body was already bad, a problem, not enough, and something I needed to apologize for or be grateful for anyone choosing.

What I also love about this book is that it helps us recognize the ways in which we already have… show more.

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… show more.

I learned so much and gained important insight after reading this book.

It offers really actionable frameworks for challenging our own negative biases about our bodies and the judgment we might have for others, because as the author emphasizes, self-care must be predicated on care for the community—caring for one another.

Taylor calls for big, systemic change for a society that is way too hard on bodies that don’t “fit” according to capitalistic, patriarchal, and historically colonialist influences. And in doing so, she is an excellent guide for how to be and make change.

I love how Sonya Renee Taylor positions radical self love as the only reasonable (and compassionate) response to having a body, no matter how difficult that body feels to be in at times.

Her unique take on body image breaks through the entrenched, systemic nature of body hatred and self-improvement to reveal how the diet culture distracts us from reality and our purpose in life: to love and be loved. 

These days I am ambivalent on what it means to be “body-positive” due to how it’s been watered down in the last couple of years.

That said, Renee Taylor does a really good job of using her book to detail why body-positivity (in this case, “radical self-love”) is important in doing away with the shame that is attached to our bodies—particularly when those bodies are fat.

I met Sonya Renee Taylor in 2017 at a training organized by my nonprofit, The Body Positive. We hugged when we met, and it was one of the warmest hugs I’ve ever received. During Sonya’s keynote address, I was mesmerized by her wisdom and by the incredibly poetic way she shared her ideas about why and how to love our bodies. Her book was published the following year, and it is just as powerful as she is in person. The Body Positive has been teaching people to think about self-love as a radical act since the 1990s, so it’s good… show more.

World-renowned activist and poet Sonya Renee Taylor explores how radical self-love dismantles shame and has the power to dismantle whole systems of injustice. She offers specific tools, actions, reflection prompts, and resources to help you heal from body shame and rebuild your relationship with your body. Beautifully written, this is a book I go back to again and again. There is also now a companion workbook: Your Body is Not An Apology Workbook.

This is one of the most empowering books I’ve ever read. In a society that’s deeply in thrall to the thin white ideal, it feels radical to push back against that idea and claim space for bodies that may not fit that paradigm. In this book, Sonya Renee Taylor inspires us to think about body image in terms of systemic change and community, and in the process maps out a path toward a different way of being.