Here are 100 books that Fat Chance fans have personally recommended if you like
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I have been reading, researching, and writing on the limitations of market capitalism and the unique and important role of government in meeting public needs for almost 30 years. I have come to firmly believe that we can’t – as a nation and planet – solve our most pressing problems without rebuilding trust in government and the capacity and authority of governing institutions. We can’t eliminate poverty, eradicate structural racism, protect our environment and the planet without democratic institutions that have the power to do so. We need markets, but transferring too much power to the market has created many of the problems we face today.
This is a deep investigative dive into the methods and practices global food corporations use to get us to buy and eat more – regardless of the health impacts on ourselves, families, and communities.
It describes how companies use sophisticated neuroscience to stimulate overconsumption, create cravings, and ultimately distort eating habits. It gave me great insight into how our individual market choices are not simply a response to personal needs but are deeply manipulated by the science and practice of corporate marketing.
In China, for the first time, the people who weigh too much now outnumber those who weigh too little. In Mexico, the obesity rate has tripled in the past three decades. In the UK over 60 per cent of adults and 30 per cent of children are overweight, while the United States remains the most obese country in the world.
We are hooked on salt, sugar and fat. These three simple ingredients are used by the major food companies to achieve the greatest allure for the lowest possible cost. Here, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter…
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 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.
An excellent, well-written memoir of what it is like to be a food addict. Sara Somers tells her story of discovery and how she finds recovery. You really feel the drama of what it is like to eat, to overeat to the point of shame and sickness, and then that is possible to recover from even the worst case. A book to identify and feel inspired to change.
For nearly fifty years, Sara Somers suffered from untreated food addiction. In this brutally honest and intimate memoir, Somers offers readers an inside view of a food addict's mind, showcasing her experiences of obsessive cravings, compulsivity, and powerlessness regarding food.
Saving Sara chronicles Somers's addiction from childhood to adulthood, beginning with abnormal eating as a nine-year-old. As her addiction progresses in young adulthood, she becomes isolated, masking her shame and self-hatred with drugs and alcohol. Time and again, she rationalizes why this time will be different, only to have her physical cravings lead to ever-worse binges, to see her promises…
My world is motivated by food: what to eat, when to eat, where to eat. At least since I was 12, when I was diagnosed with Type-1 diabetes. This is when I learned the “boring” things like carbs, fat, protein, and fiber. Scrutiny of my diet, and the food I ate, became a passion and finally my career. Not only in what I buy at the grocery store or put on my plate, but in the topics I write about. For me, food comes with its life-sustaining compliment: Insulin. How will techno foods be processed in my body? This question drives me to understand future foods at a molecular level, and then to share what I’ve learned in my writing.
Can you recall dipping your finger into a pile of sugar and placing it on your tongue?
Sugar is a magical ingredient that does far more than sweeten. It keeps food moist and soft and it extends the shelf-life in packaged foods. These are just a few reasons why we’re hooked on sugar and Gary Taubes takes us deep into sugars’ history.
What he uncovers is the opposite of sweet. We’re hooked, he tells us, and it’s the reason our chronic conditions are still on the rise. Taubes’ book pulls you along following the investigative journey on how sugar rose to dominance and what it’s doing to human health.
More than half a billion adults and 40 million children on the planet are obese. Diabetes is a worldwide epidemic. Evidence increasingly shows that these illnesses are linked to the other major Western diseases: hypertension, heart disease, even Alzheimer's and cancer, and that shockingly, sugar is likely the single root cause. Yet the nutritional advice we receive from public health bodies is muddled, out of date, and frequently contradictory, and in many quarters still promotes the unproven hypothesis that fats are the greatest evil.
With expert science and compelling storytelling, Gary Taubes investigates the history of nutritional science which, shaped…
I am a licensed marriage and family therapist and have been helping addicts thrive in recovery since 2009. My first book, The Mindfulness Workbook for Addiction, has sold over 70,000 copies and been published in several countries. Books can offer inspiration, comfort, support, and relief during recovery. In my writing, as in my work with clients, I hope to offer a path to greater fulfillment and joy after addiction.
So many women in recovery from addiction have also experienced disordered eating. The food behaviors might exist alongside your other addiction, be your primary concern, or emerge in recovery as a new attempt to cope with the feelings that are left behind. Geneen Roth is, in my opinion, the guru of emotional eating recovery. All of her many books are worth exploring, but I chose this one because of its deeply spiritual message. While she doesn’t use the word “mindfulness” explicitly, Roth encourages a mindful relationship with food and with your body: “Because when you evoke curiosity and openness with a lack of judgment, you align yourself with beauty and delight and love—for their own sake” (p. 106).
Embraced by Oprah, the #1 New York Times bestselling guide that explains the connection between eating and emotion from Geneen Roth—noted authority on mindful eating.
No matter how sophisticated or wealthy or broke or enlightened you are, how you eat tells all.
After three decades of studying, teaching, and writing about our compulsions with food, bestselling author Geneen Roth adds a powerful new dimension to her work in Women Food and God. She begins with her most basic concept: the way you eat is inseparable from your core beliefs about being alive. Your relationship with food is an exact mirror…
I’ve been interested in diets ever since I watched my mom diet while I was growing up. For decades, I enthusiastically jumped on the diet roller coaster myself, and thus began my quest to find the “perfect” way to eat. Not one of these “diets” ever worked for me for long-term weight loss, however, and I became more and more confused about what I “should” be eating. Finally, I was able to lose over 80 pounds thanks to intermittent fasting, but I was still confused about what I should be eating. Once I figured out the when (intermittent fasting), the what followed, thanks to the work of these authors.
Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food is also a classic, coming out in 2008. This book takes you deeper into the world of ultra-processed foods vs. whole foods—though the term “ultra-processed” wasn’t yet being used when he wrote this book. His famous “eater’s manifesto”—Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. – is the tl/dr version, but if you want to learn more about how he came up with this manifesto, you’ll find it all within these pages.
#1 New York Times Bestseller from the author of This is Your Mind on Plants, How to Change Your Mind, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and Food Rules
Food. There's plenty of it around, and we all love to eat it. So why should anyone need to defend it?
Because in the so-called Western diet, food has been replaced by nutrients, and common sense by confusion--most of what we’re consuming today is longer the product of nature but of food science. The result is what Michael Pollan calls the American Paradox: The more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we see…
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…
One of the reasons I wanted to write about and explore mental health was because I was always fascinated by how the mind works and how it can turn on you without provocation. How and why some people can power through dark times, while others struggle is a topic that, within the African American community, isn't frequently discussed. Often the advice given to someone about how to get through depression or anxiety is to pray or just dig deep and power through. It is the idea that because our ancestors suffered so much, those of us living in "easier" times should have nothing to be sad about that seems to prevent us from asking for help or getting therapy.
Cooner takes on body dysmorphia in a new and unusual way. Ever once weighed over three hundred pounds but even after gastric bypass surgery she continues to hear the voice in her head, Skinny. Skinny constantly tells Ever that she’s still fat, and therefore unworthy. Even with her continuing weight loss, Skinny tells Ever she’s worthless, unwanted, and disposable. It’s not until Ever confronts her self-doubt that she begins to truly heal mentally. I liked how Cooner gave Ever’s body dysmorphia a literal voice. I feel like many girls with eating disorders would relate to having such a toxic voice in their heads.
This novel kickstarted a national conversation on weight, beauty, and transformation. In it, we meet Ever, a fifteen-year-old girl who weighs over 300 pounds and is haunted by a voice in her head she calls "Skinny." Skinny tells Ever she is ugly. Fat. Unlovable. And Ever believes her. When Ever makes the controversial choice to have gastric bypass surgery, she does start losing weight and gains the interest of boys...but Skinny is still there, louder than before. Ever will need to confront that voice before she can truly find, and accept, her own.
I’m fascinated by angry, feral, primal women. In my book, ten stories feature these women, the ones doing the things we’re not supposed to do, thinking and feeling and saying the things we’re not supposed to. I think we’re beyond powerful when we embrace our anger, nourish and cultivate it, channel it. So I write about these women in the hopes that I’ll get a bit of their strength. The books in this list have inspired me as a writer and thrilled me as a reader.
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 surgeryas 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.
Dietland will be adapted into AMC's 10-episode straight-to-series starring multiple-Emmy winner Julianna Margulies and Joy Nash.
Plum Kettle does her best not to be noticed, because when you're fat, to be noticed is to be judged. Or mocked. Or worse.
But when a mysterious woman starts following her, Plum finds herself involved with an underground community of women who live life on their own terms. At the same time, a dangerous guerrilla group called "Jennifer" begins to terrorize a world that mistreats women. As Plum grapples with her personal struggles, she becomes entangled in a sinister plot, the consequences of…
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.
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.
“One of the great thinkers of our generation . . . I feel fresher and smarter and happier for sitting down with her.”—Jameela Jamil, iWeigh Podcast
The co-host of the Maintenance Phase podcast and creator of Your Fat Friend equips you with the facts to debunk common anti-fat myths and with tools to take action for fat justice
The pushback that shows up in conversations about fat justice takes exceedingly predicable form. Losing weight is easy—calories in, calories out. Fat people are unhealthy. We’re in the midst of an obesity epidemic. Fat…
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