Here are 100 books that The Body Image Book for Girls fans have personally recommended if you like
The Body Image Book for Girls.
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Look around us—DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) is under attack. From challenges to the Voting Rights Act and bans on books to the suppression of history and education, protections and rights are being rolled back. We must all recognize that systemic racism, patriarchy, homophobia, and other forms of discrimination harm not only the oppressed but also those who ostensibly benefit from these structures. It is time to move beyond passive or performative allyship and become proactive Disruptors—individuals willing to stand up and use their voices to advocate for equity and mutual respect.
This book is a historical narrative that begins in the Renaissance of the 14th century and explores the relationship between Black women’s bodies and race.
It was an eye-opening and emotional book that made me grapple with my own body issues and how women negotiate their place in the larger society.
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 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…
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’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.
I first read this when it came out in 1992, at a time when few people were publicly connecting body image and feminism. This book literally changed the way I saw the world! It liberated me to stop spending so much time and energy trying to make my body fit an impossible mold and to start using my talents for more important things.
The bestselling classic that redefined our view of the relationship between beauty and female identity .
Every day, women around the world are confronted with a dilemma - how to look. In a society embroiled in a cult of female beauty and youthfulness, pressure on women to conform physically is constant and all-pervading. In this iconic, gripping and frank expose, Naomi Wolf exposes the tyranny of the beauty myth through the ages and its oppressive function today, in the home and at work, in literature and the media, in relationships between men and women, between women and women. With pertinent…
I've been making messes with paint, string, and words, as well as in love, mothering, and in virtually every other way imaginable my whole life. Eventually, an expertise began to grow, and the confusion in my life began to make sense through my creations, while at the same time, the seemingly irrelevant words and textures I was making started to tell me something about my life. Eventually, my lived experience and training in the Expressive Arts Therapies have led me to the roles of teacher, educator, and contemplative artist. If we pay attention to what we express and how we express things, we can find our way through any mess we find ourselves in.
As an anxious mother, I struggled to understand how my creative practice could help me through this trying stage of life.
This book was the first key to help me unlock how my creative practice could support my healing and help me learn more about myself. But most importantly, it gave me permission to proclaim that I couldknow and understand the world through my intimate creative expressions.
Part memoir, part instruction, this book provided the road map for who I am today: a woman who welcomes her suffering into the creative realm and watches it transform into insight.
An expert in art therapy offers this “wonderful” guide “for anyone, artistic or not, who is interested in using art to know more about himself or herself” (Library Journal)
Making art—giving form to the images that arise in our mind's eye, our dreams, and our everyday lives—is a form of spiritual practice through which knowledge of ourselves can ripen into wisdom. This book offers encouragement for everyone to explore art-making in this spirit of self-discovery—plus practical instructions on material, methods, and activities, such as ways to:
• Discover a personal myth or story • Recognize patterns and themes in one's…
In the small Greek village I grew up in, my father read poetry to me when I was too young to understand any of it, and likely because of this I was pulled to the sound of the words and to reading anything that came my way. In high school, I fell in love with Plato’s writings, and later, as an undergraduate, philosophy saved me from my official major: economics. I continued in my Psychology Master’s, with Paul Kline’s “exceptional abilities” course, a philosophy class about consciousness. I read tons of books and I am enticed by writers who search for life’s questions and self-awareness.
If you were to read one of Kundera’s novels, let it be this, Immortality!
It’s the last of a trilogy (that includes The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness Of Being), and Kundera’s masterful attempt to answer questions such as: What’s the meaning of life? And is immortality so unbearable as our brief existence?
Its plot is Kunderian, light, and poetical. The story initiates from a simple gesture by Agnes, one of the protagonists, but as it progresses the reader begins to feel the heaviness of mortality and the endless challenges of love. It’s a beautiful discussion on the nature of one’s legacy, and how one changes (or not) through the passage of time, and unfortunately can’t do much about it.
This breathtaking, reverberating survey of human nature finds Kundera still attempting to work out the meaning of life without losing his acute sense of humour. It is one of those great unclassifiable masterpieces that appear once every twenty years or so.
'It will make you cleverer, maybe even a better lover. Not many novels can do that.' Nicholas Lezard, GQ
When I entered my fifties, I was very surprised to discover that I didn’t have my life all figured out. This was especially surprising since the nature of a good human life has been my research topic for decades. What I have learned, from philosophy and from my collaborations with psychologists, is that it’s always going to be a process. We have to figure out what matters and how to get it, we have to navigate value conflicts, and we have to accept that the answers will change as our circumstances change. The books I’ve recommended aren’t guides to life, but I think they’re great for understanding the process.
To achieve the things that matter to us, we have to know what they are.
We tend to think we know ourselves really well – certainly better than anyone else knows us. But in this book, psychologist Timothy Wilson presents fascinating evidence that we don’t know ourselves as well as we think we do.
In particular, we tend to rationalize our choices after the fact in ways that don’t actually reflect our deeper, emotional state.
This book opened my mind to the idea that we need to “look under the hood” to figure out what matters to us most.
"Know thyself," a precept as old as Socrates, is still good advice. But is introspection the best path to self-knowledge? What are we trying to discover, anyway? In an eye-opening tour of the unconscious, as contemporary psychological science has redefined it, Timothy D. Wilson introduces us to a hidden mental world of judgments, feelings, and motives that introspection may never show us.
This is not your psychoanalyst's unconscious. The adaptive unconscious that empirical psychology has revealed, and that Wilson describes, is much more than a repository of primitive drives and conflict-ridden memories. It is a set of pervasive, sophisticated mental…
Before he became a bestselling author with his debut novel, Before We Ever Spoke, Dan Largent spent the better part of two decades as a high school baseball coach. In 2010, he guided Olmsted Falls High School to its first-ever State Final Four and was subsequently named Greater Cleveland Division I Coach of the Year. Dan stepped away from his duties as a baseball coach in 2017 to spend more time with his wife, April, and their three children Brooke, Grace, and Luke. He has, however, remained close to the game he loves by turning doubles into singles as a member of Cleveland’s finest 35 and over baseball league.
There was no way that I could ever put a book list together and NOT recommend one of Carl Deuker’s books. This book is aimed at the Young Adult crowd, but I first read it as an adult because Carl was my favorite author as a kid and I also happen to teach students in the YA crowd.
Carl is the master of weaving complex societal issues and internal conflicts into plots that revolve around athletics. In Painting the Black he does just that as the main character, Ryan Ward, is faced with a choice that I am sure many readers can relate to.
Whether you are looking for a quick and poignant read, or you have a YA student at home who loves sports, Painting the Black is a must-read.
In his senior year of high school, late bloomer Ryan Ward has just begun to feel the magic of baseball—the thrill of catching a wicked slider, of throwing a runner out, of training hard and playing hard. His friend Josh, the star of the team, has helped Ryan push his limits. But when Josh clearly pushes the limits too far, Ryan is faced with a heartbreaking dilemma: he must choose between his love for the game and his sense of integrity.
As a long-time expat in France, a creative and a Black woman, I get othered and rejected a lot. I’ve had to learn how to own my story – of starting over, of building something from nothing, of remembering where I’ve been, and reminding myself of where I’m going. I had to learn to reject the labels that others want to put on me and draft my own personal hype mantra – then embellish it with a little bombshell sparkle. The books I’ve chosen are meant to entertain while giving you the chance to remind yourself of who you are and who you can choose to be.
Sometimes things happen in life that bring us to our knees – illness, relationships fail, job losses.
And we may feel small, overwhelmed, incapable. In this awesome book about living audaciously, Jones advises the reader to write their own oriki, or personal hype mantra.
When we are at our lowest, we need to look back and see how far we’ve come, remind ourselves of who we were, who we are,and who we will be.
Just as we have the power to write our own orikis, we have the power to write our own next steps. That’s pretty bad-ass.
From the New York Times bestselling author of I'm Judging You, a hilarious and transformational book about how to tackle fear--that everlasting hater--and audaciously step into lives, careers, and legacies that go beyond even our wildest dreams
Luvvie Ajayi Jones is known for her trademark wit, warmth, and perpetual truth-telling. But even she's been challenged by the enemy of progress known as fear. She was once afraid to call herself a writer, and nearly skipped out on doing a TED talk that changed her life because of imposter syndrome. As she shares in Professional Troublemaker,…
Certified Master Life Coach and CEO of Wainwright Global, Barbara Wainwright is known as the most sought-after teacher in the coaching industry. She is famous for training and certifying over 6,500 professional coaches worldwide since 2006 and for empowering individuals to actualize their life purpose, live inspired lives, and connect with their true passion. Barbara is an international speaker, author, and educator with 3 books available on Amazon.com. I have been seeking spiritual enlightenment and personal growth all of my adult life. Now I am sharing some of my strengths through my podcast and video series Show Up For God and God Will Show Up For You in Miraculous Ways.
This book was the beginning of my spiritual journey.
Accepting that we are responsible for every aspect of our lives was a hard pill to swallow. Life happens for us, not to us. What is the purpose? The purpose (I believe) is to learn unconditional love and acceptance.
Does that mean we have to be around people that hurt us? No. It means to accept people for who they are and move on.
This book challenged me and my way of thinking. “Your thoughts create your reality” is explained in detail in this book. I’m grateful that this book was written.
Late in 1963, Jane Roberts and her husband were experimenting with a Ouija board when a personality calling himself 'Seth' began forming messages. Soon, Miss Roberts began passing easily into trance - her gestures, her eyes, her voice 'borrowed' by Seth himself. Now for those who want to put his theories to use, Seth has dictated this new book, The Nature of Personal Reality explains how unquestioned belief structure your experience - and how simply listing them can help remove barriers you have uknowingly thrown in your way. Along with other specific exercises for transforming your personal reality, Seth spells…
