Here are 41 books that Body Respect fans have personally recommended if you like
Body Respect.
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As a child raised in abject rural poverty and homeschooled in a Pentecostal Evangelical household, my intense experiences of sexism at home and church piqued my early interest in gender justice. As a Women’s Studies professor, my work centers on how social norms perpetuate patriarchy. Decades of research on body hatred has convinced me that anti-fat bias is a pressing social justice issue that harms us all. These books, especially if read in order, bust myths of fatness, unpack the racist origins of fatphobia, provide a chilling look at the personal wounds inflicted by anti-fat bias, and provide practical tools to reject the body hatred that plagues women by design.
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.
Winner, 2020 Body and Embodiment Best Publication Award, given by the American Sociological Association
Honorable Mention, 2020 Sociology of Sex and Gender Distinguished Book Award, given by the American Sociological Association
How the female body has been racialized for over two hundred years
There is an obesity epidemic in this country and poor black women are particularly stigmatized as "diseased" and a burden on the public health care system. This is only the most recent incarnation of the fear of fat black women, which Sabrina Strings shows took root more than two hundred years ago.
Strings weaves together an eye-opening…
I’ve been a professional feminist since I had a profession. I spent the first half of my career advocating for women's equality as a reproductive rights attorney and academic. I’ve spent the second half teaching women how to liberate themselves from the inside out as a feminist mindset coach, host of the UnF*ck Your Brain podcast, and founder of The School of New Feminist Thought. These books were all crucial in helping me create more confidence and more power to impact the course of my own life, and I know they will help you do the same.
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 what we need inside of us—we just have to learn how to listen to our own internal radical self-love instead of striving to “fix” ourselves based on what other people tell us we should be.
"To build a world that works for everyone, we must first make the radical decision to love every facet of ourselves...'The body is not an apology' is the mantra we should all embrace." --Kimberlé Crenshaw, legal scholar and founder and Executive Director, African American Policy Forum
"Taylor invites us to break up with shame, to deepen our literacy, and to liberate our practice of celebrating every body and never apologizing for this body that is mine and takes care of me so well." --Alicia Garza, cocreator of the Black Lives Matter Global Network and Strategy + Partnerships Director, National Domestic…
I went on my first diet in high school, a reaction to panic brought on by weight gain (which was a completely normal part of puberty). That first diet led to a decade of yo-yo dieting and food and body obession. It also led me to pursue a career in nutrition and fitness. Six years ago, I came across the book Intuitive Eating, which completely changed my life. Now, as a registered dietitian, nutrition therapist, and certified intuitive eating counselor, I'm passionate about helping people reclaim the space to eat and live, unapologetically. I'm the founder of Alissa Rumsey Nutrition and Wellness, a weight-inclusive nutrition practice that offers virtual counseling, group programs, and online trainings.
Christy Harrison, host of one of my favorite podcasts Food Psych, explores the history of diet culture and the multi-billion dollar diet and beauty industries that profit from it. She clearly lays out all the ways in which diet culture robs us of our time, money, health, and happiness. You’ll learn how to recognize all the sneaky forms of diet culture – including all the ways in which it now infiltrates the health and wellness world. Backed by strong scientific research and filled with stories from people who’ve reclaimed their bodies, minds, and lives.
Reclaim your time, money, health, and happiness from our toxic diet culture with groundbreaking strategies from a registered dietitian, journalist, and host of the Food Psych podcast.
68 percent of Americans have dieted at some point in their lives. But upwards of 90% of people who intentionally lose weight gain it back within five years. And as many as 66% of people who embark on weight-loss efforts end up gaining more weight than they lost. If dieting is so clearly ineffective, why are we so obsessed with it?
The culprit is diet culture, a system of beliefs that equates thinness…
I went on my first diet in high school, a reaction to panic brought on by weight gain (which was a completely normal part of puberty). That first diet led to a decade of yo-yo dieting and food and body obession. It also led me to pursue a career in nutrition and fitness. Six years ago, I came across the book Intuitive Eating, which completely changed my life. Now, as a registered dietitian, nutrition therapist, and certified intuitive eating counselor, I'm passionate about helping people reclaim the space to eat and live, unapologetically. I'm the founder of Alissa Rumsey Nutrition and Wellness, a weight-inclusive nutrition practice that offers virtual counseling, group programs, and online trainings.
This is the OG non-diet book, originally published in 1995 by registered dietitians Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, it has since been updated and revised four times to reflect the latest research. The book outlines the 10 principles of the intuitive eating framework, including tips and suggestions on how to integrate intuitive eating into your day-to-day lives. Learn how to let go of dieting, reconnect to your body cues, and build back body trust so that you can follow your inner wisdom to tell you when, what, and how much to eat.
Since it was first published in 1995, Intuitive Eating has become the go-to book on rebuilding a healthy body image and making peace with food. It shows us that the problem is not us; it's that dieting, with its emphasis on rules and regulations, has stopped us from listening to our bodies. Written by Evelyn Tribole, M.S., R.D., and Elyse Resch - two prominent nutritionists who are the originators of this movement - Intuitive Eating: 4th Edition will teach you:
I’ve been reporting on and writing about food, eating, health, and body image for the last 25 years. So much of what we’re taught about those issues, it turns out, is wrong, inaccurate, and often damaging. I’ve made a point of uncovering the truth in those areas and to write about it in ways that help other people through this difficult terrain. My writing philosophy can be summed up in six words: I write so I’m not alone. And, I would add, so you’re not alone, either.
Though Linda Bacon didn’t originate the idea of Health at Every Size (HAES), this book popularized it for a mainstream audience. Here Bacon explains what HAES is and isn’t in clear, readable prose, supported by research, evidence, and logic. This book is a perfect starting point for anyone who wants to explore the ways we think about weight and health and how they are (and aren’t) connected.
Fat isn't the problem. 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. The solution? Health at Every Size. Tune in to your body's expert guidance. Find the joy in movement. Eat what you want, when you want, choosing pleasurable foods that help you to feel good. You too can feel great in your body right now--and Health at Every Size will show you how. Health at Every Size has been scientifically proven to boost health…
Since childhood, I’ve wanted to find out how things work. The human body is an amazing combination of mind and body. As Professor of Medicine and Metabolism at Newcastle University, I’ve been fortunate to be able to find out what goes wrong to cause type 2 diabetes. It was not the complex mystery believed by other experts, but just one simple process. A little too much fat inside the liver caused insulin not to work properly, and an overspill of fat prevented enough insulin to be made. Growing a wild idea into a proven NHS programme involves sleepless nights, disbelief of colleagues, gratitude of patients, and hugely enjoyable team-working.
Where can you get reliable information on how the body works? Online sites are notoriously unreliable. Most textbooks are unreadable. But here is a book that explains clearly how the body uses food for fuel. This book is not an ‘easy read,’ so don’t curl up with it expecting instant enlightenment. However, if you want to learn the beautiful details of how your body works, go for it. The chapter on "Integration of carbohydrate, fat and protein metabolism in normal daily life" conveys an understanding of how food handling works, and just looking at the diagrams and graphs will take you a long way. And simply reading the "Key learning points" at the start of each chapter will introduce you to the magic of metabolism.
Metabolic Regulation looks in detail at how molecules, cells and tissues operate collectively in human health and disease, using an approach that has become known as 'integrative physiology'. Since the publication of the first edition of this extremely well received book, the understanding of how metabolism is regulated has developed substantially in several ways, for example with the discovery of the hormone leptin, and also in the continuing advances in the understanding of gene expression. Full details of these and other new advances are included in this fully updated edition. Carefully laid out with relevant and clearly explained examples, and…
Mathematics and chemistry were my strongest subjects at school, and I started programming computers when I was 16, but life seemed most important. Hence I studied biochemistry in university but moved into molecular biology with programming to assist the data analysis. My track record in successfully predicting new biology through computing led to a pharmaceutical company recruiting me to do bioinformatics for them. However, not content with studying genes and proteins, I pushed for bioinformatics to move up into metabolism, anatomy, and physiology. That’s when I discovered systems biology. My international reputation lies at this interface and includes discoveries in microbial physiology, botany, agriculture, animal biology, and antenatal diseases.
This book turns on its head what I was taught about what controls metabolite flow through a pathway. It covers highly remarkable discoveries concerning which steps control changes in metabolite levels: those at the end rather than the start of pathways. This is amazing because it explains why decades of effort by bioengineers to overproduce particular metabolites was unsuccessful.
In response to a request from such a project, I explained how to block the inhibitory regulation by the early pathway step but added that, according to metabolic control theory, this would leave the end-product levels unchanged. I was correct on both counts! When my group later provided results from using a systems biology approach, they achieved their production target levels.
I am an addictions physician with a passion for the field of food addiction. I have spoken, taught, and written about this subject for over 15 years. I am the author of Food Junkies: Recovery from Food Addiction; have a thriving free Facebook group: I'm Sweet Enough: Sugar-Free for Life (which you are invited to join),and a podcast called Food Junkies—to catch up on the latest in the field. I am also a food addict in recovery for over 15 years and have maintained a 100-pound weight loss since then.
This book is written by the founder of the very successful weight loss food program, Susan Peirce Thompson. She covers the science and clinical picture of food addiction. Which she believes is essential for long-term successful weight loss.
This book is very public/reader-friendly. She is also a food addict in recovery and is very open about her trials and tribulations. I find her very engaging and personable.
Over 99% of people who try to lose weight don't succeed. They don't get slender and they don't stay slender long term. The average dieter spends a significant amount of money and makes four or five new attempts each year. Four or five new attempts each year with almost no hope of success. Only 1% of people will get down to their goal weight on traditional diets. Susan Peirce Thompson. Ph.D., suggests that there's something fishy going on here, something important we're not paying attention to. We don't have an obesity problem; we have an obesity mystery-and she has a…
I am all about support, and support is a big part of Black Girl Magic. I believe that every woman should have a support system and community that values each and every person in it. Many of these authors have been featured on my podcast Support is Sexy, an interview-based podcast that introduces dynamic women professionals and the stories of their journeys to my audiences around the world. I recommended the books of these women because I love their message of self-care, self-love, support, and nurturing a healthy community.
We cannot always guide ourselves into a self-care mindset and the true transformation definitely doesn’t happen all at once.A Year of Self-Careby psychologist Dr. Zoe Shaw offers an easy and enjoyable way to navigate your self-love journey without feeling cringy. The daily practices, tips, and strategies are incredibly insightful and practical, and will benefit anyone looking to improve their overall sense of well-being.
Give yourself the gift of self-care using simple daily exercises
Gain a more positive outlook and improve your overall sense of well-being with this supportive and inspiring guided journal.
A Year of Self-Care will lead you through 365 simple, thought-provoking exercises created to help you stay committed to self-care. You’ll spend a year focusing on positive thinking and self-love with:
Bite-sized self-care tips—You don’t need a huge time commitment to start living a healthier life. These 15-minute motivational exercises make it easy to stick to a routine no matter how busy you are. That’s 91 hours of self-care over the…
I’ve been a professional feminist since I had a profession. I spent the first half of my career advocating for women's equality as a reproductive rights attorney and academic. I’ve spent the second half teaching women how to liberate themselves from the inside out as a feminist mindset coach, host of the UnF*ck Your Brain podcast, and founder of The School of New Feminist Thought. These books were all crucial in helping me create more confidence and more power to impact the course of my own life, and I know they will help you do the same.
This book was such a breath of fresh air for the self-help and wellness community! As a coach, I’m exposed to a lot of wellness nonsense all the time, and I appreciate any work that is focused on both illuminating how structural forces impact our lives and helping empower people to live their best lives within those constraints.
I try to strike a nuanced balance in my own work, and this book does a great job of interrogating what we mean by “wellness,” what kinds of social forces impact and limit our “wellness,” and how we can nevertheless learn to take care of ourselves in radical and deeply important ways.
National Bestseller featured by Good Morning America, NPR's Code Switch, The New York Times, and The Guardian
NPR's "Books We Love for 2023"
Forbes' "Greatest Self-Help Books of All Time"
"Realistic and trustworthy" -- InStyle
"This isn't just another self-help book. It gives us a clear-eyed look at the way social systems drain our energy, and a concrete set of principles to rely on as we declare independence from these systems." -Martha Beck, New York Times bestselling author of The Way of Integrity
"This book is for anyone who's ever removed a 'relaxing' sheet mask only to realize it hasn't…