October 16th – 25th is Body Acceptance Week at FSU. We are partnering with CHAW to raise awareness about this important week and to suggest some related books for your reading list that FSU libraries have recently added to our collection.
Body Acceptance week is a national initiative from the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA). The goal is to promote body acceptance while also providing resources, education, and support for those experiencing body dissatisfaction. When we think of body acceptance, the first thing that might come to mind is body positivity. While this can be a part of body acceptance practice for some, feeling positively toward our bodies is not required. Body acceptance can also include the practice of body neutrality, which gives us space to feel positively, negatively, or even neutrally about our bodies while also striving to respect and take care of them.
This year’s theme for Body Acceptance Week at FSU is body neutrality. You may not realize it, but many of the things you do to take care of yourself every day are body neutral practices. For example, having a snack or taking a study break. In these moments, you are being responsive to your body’s needs for nourishment and rest. While these may seem like minor actions, they demonstrate care and respect for your body, a foundation for a healthy relationship with yourself and others.
Feeling curious? Check out CHAW’s upcoming events this week to learn more about body neutrality and engage in several important body neutral practices: cherishing, moving, and nourishing your body. Follow @fsuchaw for more resources and support related to body acceptance and wellness.
Browse our booklist below to discover a variety of perspectives on body acceptance. Learn how culture intersects with our perception of our bodies and how you can start to explore body acceptance and caring for yourself on your own terms. Happy reading!
Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-Being, and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating by Christy Harrison
In Anti-Diet, Christy Harrison takes on diet culture and the multi-billion-dollar industries that profit from it, exposing all the ways it robs people of their time, money, health, and happiness. Drawing on scientific research, personal experience, and stories from patients and colleagues, Anti-Diet provides a radical alternative to diet culture, and helps readers reclaim their bodies, minds, and lives so they can focus on the things that truly matter.
The Body is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love by Sonya Renee Taylor
The Body Is Not an Apology offers radical self-love as the balm to heal the wounds inflicted by these violent systems. World-renowned activist and poet Sonya Renee Taylor invites us to reconnect with the radical origins of our minds and bodies and celebrate our collective, enduring strength. As we awaken to our own indoctrinated body shame, we feel inspired to awaken others and to interrupt the systems that perpetuate body shame and oppression against all bodies. When we act from this truth on a global scale, we usher in the transformative opportunity of radical self-love, which is the opportunity for a more just, equitable, and compassionate world – for us all.
Body Kindness: Transform Your Health from the Inside Out, and Never Say Diet Again by Rebecca Scritchfield
This practical, inspirational, and visually lively book shows you the way to a sense of well-being attained by understanding how to love, connect, and care for yourself—and that includes your mind as well as your body. With mind and body exercises to keep your energy spiraling up and prompts to help you identify what YOU really want and care about, Body Kindness helps you let go of things you can’t control and embrace the things you can by finding the workable, daily steps that fit you best. It’s the anti-diet book that leads to a more joyful and meaningful life.
Body Respect: What Conventional Health Books Get Wrong, Leave Out, and Just Plain Fail to Understand About Weight by Lindo Bacon
Dr. Linda Bacon and Dr. Lucy Aphramor’s Body Respect debunks common myths about weight, including the misconceptions that BMI can accurately measure health, that fatness necessarily leads to disease, and that dieting will improve health. They also help make sense of how poverty and oppression—such as racism, homophobia, and classism—affect life opportunity, self-worth, and even influence metabolism. Body insecurity is rampant, and it doesn’t have to be. It’s time to overcome our culture’s shame and distress about weight, to get real about inequalities and health, and to show every body respect.
Decolonizing Wellness: A QTBIPOC-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation by Dalia Kinsey
A road map to body acceptance and self-care for queer people of color, Decolonizing Wellness is filled with practical eating practices, journal prompts, affirmations, and mindfulness tools. Ultimately, decolonizing nutrition is essential not only to our personal well-being but to our community’s well-being and to the possibility of greater social transformation. This is a body positivity and food freedom book for marginalized folks. It’s a guide to throwing out food rules in exchange for internal cues and adopting a self-love-based approach to eating. It’s about learning to trust our bodies and turning mealtime into a time for celebration and healing.
Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture by Virginia Sole-Smith
Fat Talk argues for a reclaiming of “fat,” which is not synonymous with “unhealthy,” “inactive,” or “lazy.” Talking to researchers and activists, as well as parents and kids across a broad swath of the country, Sole-Smith lays bare how America’s focus on solving the “childhood obesity epidemic” has perpetuated a second crisis of disordered eating and body hatred for kids of all sizes. She exposes our society’s internalized fatphobia and elucidates how and why we need to stop “preventing obesity” and start supporting kids in the bodies they have. Sole-Smith offers an alternative framework for parenting around food and bodies, and a way for us all to work toward a more weight-inclusive world—because it’s not our kids, or their bodies, who need fixing.
How to Do the Work: Recognize Your Patterns, Heal from Your Past, and Create Your Self by Dr. Nicole LePera
In How to Do the Work, Dr. LePera offers both a manifesto for Self Healing as well as an essential guide to creating a more vibrant, authentic, and joyful life. Drawing on the latest research from a diversity of scientific fields and healing modalities, Dr. LePera helps us recognize how adverse experiences and trauma in childhood live with us, resulting in whole body dysfunction—activating harmful stress responses that keep us stuck engaging in patterns of codependency, emotional immaturity, and trauma bonds. Nothing short of a paradigm shift, this is a celebration of empowerment that will forever change the way we approach mental wellness and self-care.
More Than A Body: Your Body Is an Instrument, Not an Ornament by Lexie Kite and Lindsay Kite
Our beauty-obsessed world perpetuates the idea that happiness, health, and ability to be loved are dependent on how we look, but authors Lindsay and Lexie Kite offer an alternative vision. With insights drawn from their extensive body image research, Lindsay and Lexie—PhDs and founders of the nonprofit Beauty Redefined (and also twin sisters!)—lay out an action plan that arms you with the skills you need to reconnect with your whole self and free yourself from the constraints of self-objectification.
Train Happy: An Intuitive Exercise Plan for Everybody by Tally Rye
Personal Trainer and Broadcaster Tally Rye is on a mission to change the way we think about exercise, encouraging you to approach it with a mindset of self-care rather than the traditional self-punishment narrative. As you read, you will discover the wonderful physical and mental health benefits of regular activity and then start to feel their effects as you follow Tally’s 10-week training plan. The plan is designed to slot into your life in a sustainable and flexible way, providing resistance workouts, bodyweight workouts and weekly challenges to keep mixing it up which can all be done in the comfort of your own home.
The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses, and Find Your True Well-Being by Christy Harrison
“It’s not a diet, it’s a lifestyle.” You’ve probably heard this phrase from any number of people in the wellness space. But as Christy Harrison reveals in her latest book, wellness culture promotes a standard of health that is often both unattainable and deeply harmful. The Wellness Trap delves into the persistent, systemic problems with that industry, offering insight into its troubling pattern of cultural appropriation and its destructive views on mental health, and shedding light on how a growing distrust of conventional medicine has led ordinary people to turn their backs on science. Weaving together history, memoir, reporting, and practical advice, Harrison illuminates the harms of wellness culture while re-imagining our society’s relationship with well-being.
Whether you’re looking to deepen your understanding of body acceptance, explore new perspectives on wellness, or simply find an empowering read, this booklist offers a diverse range of titles to nourish your mind and spirit. As you engage with these works, may you feel inspired to cherish, move, and nourish your body in ways that honor your unique journey. Happy reading, and remember to follow @fsuchaw for more resources and support during Body Acceptance Week and beyond.
