53 books like Fat

To be honest, I could’ve picked any book by David Harvey–he writes about capitalism and how it affects people and the places we inhabit in a really accessible way. This brief introduction is a great way to get into his writing (a gateway book!). It is also a useful guide to thinking about contemporary issues with hope rather than despair.

Like the book by Ahmed, this one offers ideas for a socially just society, giving the reader solutions and not just problems. I think it is important when critiquing society to come up with tangible ways that we can move away from unequal systems to more equitable ones. This book makes change feel possible.

I love this book because it is written in a poetic and accessible way to talk about a subject that I am really passionate about. It is genuinely a joy to read, and I couldn’t put it down. It also helped me when I was writing the conclusion of my book. I wanted to end on positive actions rather than a summary of everything that is wrong with the world.

Ahmed’s book is an instruction book and a call to arms. The conclusion is in two parts, and the first part, A Killjoy Survival Kit, contains a list of things that will make the feminist struggle easier to handle–including books by your favorite feminist. This one is definitely in my survival kit. 

This book appeals to me as both an academic and an artist. In my art practice, I critique gender stereotypes in commercial and commodity culture, and this book provides a brief history of advertising and why it is bad for societies, followed by brilliant creative case studies of activist artists and artworks.

It contains lots of images of poster campaigns and graphic designs that uncover the ways that adverts play with our fears and desires–a subject that I talk about in relation to body and beauty ideals in my book. The artists in this book are very clever and hugely talented, so the book is a constant source of inspiration.

There are a lot of books about selfies out there (including mine), so it was difficult to choose one. Tiddenberg’s book is my favorite because it talks about why selfies are treated as unimportant or superficial things. However, it shows that being able to represent yourself as you wish is a powerful tool.

Tiddenberg argues that selfies are mocked and viewed as a demonstration of narcissism because they shift power away from visual culture gatekeepers, such as fashion photographers and magazine editors, towards marginalized people who have less power. By clearly showing why some people hate selfies, the book articulates why I love them.

Gordon really gets at the heart of why fatphobia is “unfair”.

Because, once again, it’s not just about name-calling. It’s about the fact that our economy, healthcare system, etc., use fatphobia to discriminate against fat people.

And in a way that I guaranteed to impact our quality of life.

I read the book twice from cover to cover.

We have been told for decades to eat a low-fat diet and to limit saturated fat, especially animal fat and tropical oils, to try to prevent coronary artery disease. We now have epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and dementia, and I personally struggled for years with constant carb craving and yo-yo dieting.

The author of The Big Fat Surprise, Nina Teicholz, is an investigative journalist who spent ten years trying to understand how the low-fat guidelines came about and discovered that the evidence just doesn’t support this advice. Teicholz discusses which fats are healthy and which are not.

This is a must-read by anti-sugar advocate Robert Lustig. He is a paediatric endocrinologist who became famous with the viral YouTube video: Sugar the Bitter Truth.

This book covers the science of sugar and its detrimental effects on the body. This is a staple its the food addiction field. For a scientific book, it is readable and mind-boggling.

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. 

This book is a knockout, one that pushed me to see through our dangerous diet culture (and got me all fired up). After years of being judged and mocked as a fat woman, Plum is fixated on weight-loss surgery as the way to live a better life. But when she catches a young woman following her, Plum discovers an entire underground community of women living lives out of bounds, and a guerrilla group terrorizing predatory men. The story is propulsive and exciting, and it’s all fueled by righteous anger. The women Plum meet are full of rage at our broken world but also infused with beautiful compassion. Both can be true; both are often true.  The book has stuck with me for years, and I often return to it as a template for writing a killer story that centers and celebrates angry women.

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.