Here are 100 books that What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat fans have personally recommended if you like
What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat.
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I am a curious, passionate, and introspective woman. My values have led me to a quest to have a profound impact on the world and leave a legacy of healing. Each book on my list has profoundly impacted me and led me to challenge my values, rethink my priorities, heal my inner turmoil, and use my lived experience to help others lead a more meaningful life.
This book profoundly moved me, opening my eyes to a concept I had never contemplated. This book explores the origins of weight stigma and anti-fatness while linking them to the history of the development of racism.
Patriarchy, white supremacy, and the false conclusion that black people who were brought to Europe to be slaves were inferior because of their “larger appetite for sex and food” is a stunning revelation. This book rocked my world and incited inner rage and a quest to right this wrong.
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 am a curious, passionate, and introspective woman. My values have led me to a quest to have a profound impact on the world and leave a legacy of healing. Each book on my list has profoundly impacted me and led me to challenge my values, rethink my priorities, heal my inner turmoil, and use my lived experience to help others lead a more meaningful life.
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.
"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…
As a queer, fat disabled Black woman in America, I am all too familiar with the experiences and history that these 5 aforementioned authors detail when it comes how deep fatphobia is embedded in this country. And how it harms us everyday—even if you’re not fat. I remain passionate about the eradication of fatphobia in our society because too much is at stake in terms of housing discrimination, employment discrimination, disability discrimination, healthcare discrimination and etc. for one notto care. - Clarkisha Kent, author and culture critic.
Yeboah is my favorite in this genre because she really nails the perils of dating as a fat Black woman during these modern times.
What we have to go through (fetishization, degradation, etc., etc.) is so ridiculous and she is able to speak to this in a way that is [sadly] honest, but still a bit humorous. Which is hard to do.
'I love Stephanie... She's one of my favourite truth tellers online, she pulls no punches and empowers so many women with her own commitment to equality... This book is going to mean a lot, to a lot of people.' - Jameela Jamil
Stephanie Yeboah has experienced racism and fat-phobia throughout her life. From being bullied at school to being objectified and humiliated in her dating life, Stephanie's response to discrimination has always been to change the narrative around body-image and what we see as beautiful.
In her debut book, Fattily Ever After, Stephanie speaks openly and courageously about her own…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
As a queer, fat disabled Black woman in America, I am all too familiar with the experiences and history that these 5 aforementioned authors detail when it comes how deep fatphobia is embedded in this country. And how it harms us everyday—even if you’re not fat. I remain passionate about the eradication of fatphobia in our society because too much is at stake in terms of housing discrimination, employment discrimination, disability discrimination, healthcare discrimination and etc. for one notto care. - Clarkisha Kent, author and culture critic.
Dionne digs deep on what exactly one means by “surveillance and control” levied at fat women (especially where “health” is concerned, or rather concern trolls).
A poignant and ruthlessly honest journey through cultural expectations of size, race, and gender—and toward a brighter future—from National Book Award nominee Evette Dionne
My body has not betrayed me; it has continued rebounding against all odds. It is a body that others map their expectations on, but it has never let me down.
In this insightful, funny, and whip-smart book, acclaimed writer Evette Dionne explores the minefields fat Black woman are forced to navigate in the course of everyday life. From her early experiences of harassment to adolescent self-discovery in internet chatrooms to diagnosis with heart failure at age…
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…
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…
I grew up thinking that being adopted didn’t matter. I was wrong. This book is my journey uncovering the significance and true history of adoption practices in America. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women’s reproductive rights places…
I have been a feminist for as long as I can remember. I recall seeing a billboard featuring Sophie Dahl sprawling on a sofa, completely naked. I recognized that I had no control over the images that dominate the visual landscape I inhabit, and I wanted to change this. These books might seem varied, but they all critique aspects of contemporary culture and offer ways to change things. In my academic writing and artwork, I examine these issues through a queer, feminist, and anti-capitalist lens, and these books offer a glimpse into the struggles that I think are important and the methods for change that I think could work.
This book deals with a subject that I feel strongly about–fat discrimination. It includes diet culture and the damage caused by the medicalization of fat. Lupton’s book was the first I read on this subject, and it is a brilliant, concise introduction to the social and political meanings of fat today.
Importantly, it debunks things like the BMI (body mass index commonly used in medicine to determine a person’s health level) and introduced me to movements such as the Health at Every Size Movement. It describes ways that anti-fat biases are being fought against, and I try to practice them in my life and academic work.
In contemporary western societies, the fat body has become a focus of stigmatizing discourses and practices aimed at disciplining, regulating and containing it. Despite the fact that in many western countries fat bodies outnumber those that are thin, fat people are still socially marginalized, and treated with derision and even repulsion and disgust. Medical and public health experts continue to insist that an 'obesity epidemic' exists and that fatness is a pathological condition which should be prevented and controlled.
Fat is a book about why the fat body has become so reviled and reviewed as diseased, the target of such…
At just fifty-four, my husband Steve was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease in 2004. After practicing as a physician specializing in newborn intensive care for thirty years, I found myself at the opposite end of the spectrum, learning everything I could about Alzheimer’s. In 2008, Steve had a dramatic improvement in his symptoms lasting nearly four years from consuming ketogenic coconut oil and MCT oil, a low-carb whole food diet, and later a ketone ester developed at the NIH. I knew that if Steve improved many others would as well, and have been compelled to share this information by speaking and writing about ketones as an alternative fuel for the brain.
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.
A New York Times bestseller Named one of The Economist’s Books of the Year 2014 Named one of The Wall Street Journal’s Top Ten Best Nonfiction Books of 2014 Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Books of 2014 Forbes’s Most Memorable Healthcare Book of 2014
In The Big Fat Surprise, investigative journalist Nina Teicholz reveals the unthinkable: that everything we thought we knew about dietary fat is wrong. She documents how the low-fat nutrition advice of the past sixty years has amounted to a vast uncontrolled experiment on the entire population, with disastrous consequences for our health.
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been more drawn to nonfiction than fiction. I remember spending hour after hour with my mother’s World Book Encyclopedias, memorizing breeds of dogs, US state capitals, and how to sign the alphabet. I loved reading books to learn about all kinds of things, and still do. But when it comes to fiction, unless the words are arranged like musical notes on the page, I struggle to read past chapter three. I need the narrator’s voice to make my brain happy and interested. While reading, I need to feel something deeply—to laugh, cry, or have my thoughts dance so rhythmically I find myself fast-blinking.
I would liken the reading experience of this middle-grade novel-in-verse book to jumping across a bubbling brook—each page a stone to make the journey enjoyable. With just a few words, profound emotion is unpacked. Grimes spins her words absolutely beautifully in this book.
Besides the book’s language, I also felt a connection to the main character, Garvey, who struggles to find acceptance at school, home, and within himself. I read this book in one sitting because I had to find out how things would turn out for him.
This emotionally resonant novel in verse by award-winning author Nikki Grimes celebrates choosing to be true to yourself.
Garvey's father has always wanted Garvey to be athletic, but Garvey is interested in astronomy, science fiction, reading-anything but sports. Feeling like a failure, he comforts himself with food. Garvey is kind, funny, smart, a loyal friend, and he is also overweight, teased by bullies, and lonely. When his only friend encourages him to join the school chorus, Garvey's life changes. The chorus finds a new soloist in Garvey, and through chorus, Garvey finds a way to accept himself, and a way…
The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. This book traces the story of the bull in the sky, a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull.
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.
