My Summer Reading List

I’m an avid reader and love losing myself in a good book. 

My reading list is long, and I usually have three different books going at any given moment so I can easily turn to whichever one I’m in the mood for.

Following are a few books regarding diet and wellness cultures, disordered eating, anti-fat bias, body liberation and more that I’m excited to dive into this summer. Perhaps you will be, too.

Please note, I’ve provided links to Amazon but also encourage folks to buy from their favorite independent bookseller or to check out books from their local library.

Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture
Virginia Sole-Smith
This New York Times best seller "exposes the daily onslaught of fatphobia and body shaming that kids face" and offers strategies for navigating our harmful diet culture and weight-stigmatizing world.

Whether or not you have kids, if you’re desiring anti-diet, fat-positive content, I recommend checking out this book as well as Sole-Smith's Burnt Toast newsletter, podcast and online community.

The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation and Dubious Diagnosis and Find Your True Well-Being
Christy Harrison
When I had an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating, I rarely questioned anything I heard and read. If I had been taught, by resources such as this book, to view diet and wellness content through a more critical lens (e.g., Is this fad evidence-based? How solid is the research behind this claim?), I would have saved myself a lot of time, money and unnecessary suffering.

I'm also a big fan of Harrison's first book, Anti-Diet, and recommend it as a great place to start if you're new to this world. 

The Body Liberation Project: How Understanding Racism and Diet Culture Helps Cultivate Joy and Build Collective Freedom
Chrissy King
Through a combination of memoir, cultural analysis, exercises and prompts, King guides her readers on an exploration of how racism intersects with the diet, wellness and fitness industries and urges us to aim for body liberation instead of body positivity.

What’s Eating Us: Women, Food, and the Epidemic of Body Anxiety
Cole Kazdin 
Weaving together her personal story with investigative reporting, Kazdin examines how disordered eating has become both normalized and encouraged in our appearance-obsessed, weight-stigmatizing culture and how our flawed treatment systems can hinder recovery.

Recent Reads
I want to also mention two books I’ve recently read that I also recommend: Weightless and Reclaiming Body Trust.

Virtual Book Club, Anyone?
I relish talking to others about the books we’re reading and am considering starting a virtual book club to discuss important works like these. If this sounds like something you'd like to participate in, I’d love to hear from you.

Note: In alliance with the fat-acceptance community, I use fat as a neutral descriptor.

I Don’t Want to Pass My Food Issues on to My Kids

Can you relate to Sandra's story?

For as long as she can remember, Sandra's mom has meticulously counted calories and carefully weighed almost everything she eats. 

When her aunts visit her parent's house, the conversation is often centered on who is doing what diet and how it’s going, together celebrating their wins and commiserating over their struggles. 

Their own mother, Sandra's grandma, is a very restrictive eater who frequently comments on family members’ weight and polices everyone's eating.

Sandra's dad also has a fraught relationship with food. Over the years, he’s swung numerous times from eating everything to restricting something, whether it’s fat, carbs or the hours he’s allowed to eat.

In Sandra’s childhood home, food was feared, moralized and demonized. Almost every eating decision was based on how it would impact one's weight.   

At the pubescent age of 11, when it's normal for kids to gain a lot of weight, Sandra's mom took her to her first weight-loss meeting.

Although she felt a little weird being the only kid in the room, she also felt inspired by the success stories the women in the circle shared, especially when everyone cheered and clapped. 

It felt good to be a part of their club and to be doing something to fix her apparently problematic body.

Ending the Legacy
Stepping into that weight-loss clinic as a young girl launched Sandra on the dieting rollercoaster. Since then, she’s tried every diet under the sun. After more than 20 years of yo-yo dieting, she’s hit rock bottom. 

Even though she doesn’t like her body, she can’t stand the thought of going on one more diet. More than anything, she can’t stand the thought of passing her family’s legacy of body shame and dieting on to her kids.

She doesn’t want them to view food as good or bad, feel guilty about their eating, hate their bodies or obsess over their weight.

Many of my clients who are thinking about starting a family or already have kids express their desire to protect their children from our harmful diet culture. 

They don’t want them to suffer the way they and their family members have and thus are deeply motivated by the idea of not handing down their food and body challenges.

This is also true for many of my clients who don’t have children but have kids in their life, whether it’s their nieces, nephews, friends’ kids, students or team players.

I get really excited when my clients share this desire with me because I know the positive ripple effect that can occur when just one person heals their relationship with food and their body and how doing so can help put an end to a family history of disordered eating and anti-fat bias.

What Kind of Role Model?
For my clients with this goal, we spend time exploring what type of role model they want to be when it comes to food and bodies.

We talk about how they can reclaim their ability to eat intuitively while helping the kids in their life maintain their ability to do so.

Then we do the challenging yet rewarding work that’s required to divest from diet culture and build a peaceful relationship with food and their body, one that they’re excited to pass along. 

What I'm Consuming

It’s been a while since I’ve shared a roundup of the content I’m currently consuming, so here you go!

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I’m infuriated and horrified by the American Academy of Pediatrics’ new guidelines for higher-weight children that include prescribing “intensive health behavior and lifestyle treatment” for kids as young as two, weight-loss drugs for kids ages 12 and up, and bariatric surgery starting at age 13. Yes, you read that right!

Not only do these guidelines further stigmatize larger-bodied kids and put them at risk for life-threatening complications, they are also potentially setting them up for a lifetime of weight cycling, disordered eating and exercise, eating disorders, body dissatisfaction and more adverse outcomes.

Journalist Virginia Sole-Smith shares her thoughts on this here:

Why the New Obesity Guidelines for Kids Terrify Me [New York Times, gift link]

And, in her Weight and Healthcare newsletter, researcher Ragen Chastain digs deep into the guidelines to reveal undisclosed conflicts of interest, unsupportive claims, inadequate research and more:

Dangerous New American Academy of Pediatrics Guidelines for Higher-Weight Children [Substack]

Serious Issues with the American Academy of Pediatrics Guidelines for Higher-Weight Children and Adolescents [Substack]

Testing the Claim That Pediatric Weight Management Interventions Decrease Eating Disorders [Substack] 

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Every Single Diet (Even When You Don’t Use That Word) is About These 15 Awful Things [Medium]
Writer Savala Nolan nails it in this article regarding many of the ways dieting is so very problematic, including some you may not even be aware of.

“My Weight Watchers memberships didn’t come with a pamphlet explaining that there is no data showing that weight suppression works beyond a brief time except on the rarest of occasions, or that food restriction often leads to binging, or that dieting might cause all types of physical and emotional harm, or that fatness was fine and I was terrific as-is, or that the whole shebang was rooted in anti-Blackness and, hey, being Black myself I might want to think twice about that. Like the dark side of all industries, the dark side of dieting isn’t advertised.”

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It’s a Big Fat Deal: How Schools Teach Contempt for Fat People—and What We Can Do About It [Rethinking Schools]
This article by teacher and writer Katy Alexander is essential reading for anyone who works with kids, has fat kids, was a fat kid, or just plain loves kids. Don’t miss their “For My Fatties” poem at the end.

“Fat kids don’t need you to save them from being fat. They need you to save them from your own feelings about fat and our fatphobic culture.”

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You Just Need to Lose Weight: And 19 Other Myths About Fat People 
Aubrey Gordon’s second book is just as powerful as her first one and both should be required reading for everyone. And if you aren’t listening to her Maintenance Phase podcast yet, I highly recommend you start today.

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Big Girl: A Novel
I’m wrapping up with this tender, hilarious and heartbreaking novel by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan about a fat Black girl coming of age in gentrifying 1990s Harlem who dares to take up space in a world that relentlessly tries to shrink her.

Note: In alliance with the fat-acceptance community, I use fat as a neutral descriptor.