50 books like "You Just Need to Lose Weight" and 19 Other Myths About Fat People

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. 

The Body Is Not an Apology is an unflinching argument for making peace with your body.

Body size diversity is just another way humans can differ, but instead, this difference has been weaponized to create hierarchies that dehumanize people of size. The Body Is Not an Apology presents radical self-love as a salve for wounds inflicted by fatphobia. The authors call for radical self-love on a global scale to raise collective compassion and empathy to create a more equitable world.

Beyond dismantling anti-fat bias, this book also has tools for challenging racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, and transphobia. The Body Is Not an Apology reveals how these systems of oppression work together and in similar ways, and how radical self-love is vital for envisioning and working toward a just world.

A “best of books about chronic illness list” would not be complete without Gay’s heartbreaking memoir.

The bestselling author delves into chronic overeating, PTSD from a trauma she suffered as a young girl, and a complicated relationship with her overweight body. This book is both devastating and devastatingly beautiful. She explores her history with food as a Haitian-American woman as well as society’s expectations of women and women’s bodies. Gay is a true warrior, and she writes her story with guts.

Trigger Warning: this book contains explicit depictions of sexual violence.

Virgie Tovar’s The Self-Love Revolution: Radical Body Positivity for Girls of Color is exactly what it sounds like: A toolkit for practicing radical self-love.

Tovar challenges harmful diet culture and beauty culture messaging and teaches readers to spot intersecting sexism and racism in media. She encourages readers to reject cultural messages that promote body hatred, and instead, build lasting body empowerment by silencing our inner critic and moving beyond our body as the basis for our worth.

Every book Tovar has written will rock your paradigms about body size and fatness, but I especially recommend The Self-Love Revolution because it opens a space to truly imagine a world without fatphobia. And it comes with the tools and confidence boost to build that world. 

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.

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 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.

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. 

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).

Written by a pediatric occupational therapist, this book offers unique insight into how screen-based technology acts as a physical restraint which undermines, fragments, and disorganizes various systems, resulting in delays and acting out. Rowan dives deep, and her concepts and explanations have informed my work greatly. Some critical points include her explanations of how video games increase visual distractibility, how not practicing hand-printing affects the ability to read, and how core strength influences the ability to learn.