Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-Being and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating by Christy Harrison

This was a fantastic read. I highlighted passages to revisit on almost every page. The author delves into the racist, classist roots of dieting, explaining how our cultural weight bias and desire for thinness started a long time before any proclamations about body size and its relation to health. One of the most surprising things she explains is the impact that weight stigma has on our health. The weight stigma we are subject to is worse for our health than living in a large body! She backs up her statements with many good quality studies, all footnoted in the back of the book.

 Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole

After you’ve read Christy Harrison’s book and you’ve realized that dieting is a waste of your time, Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole will guide you through the steps of making peace with food and returning to the natural, intuitive eater you once were, before dieting came into your life. You will learn step by step to honor your hunger, challenge the food police, cope with emotions without using food, move your body in a way that feels good, and more. You can become a person who says “no” to a cookie and doesn’t feel deprived – or eats a cookie and doesn’t feel guilty.

Body Kindness by Rebecca Scritchfield 

Body Kindness by Rebecca Scritchfield is built on the idea that good health comes from being good to yourself. This book has a lot of great information concerning improved health, including food, sleep, exercise, and relationships. She gives the reader information needed to make healthy choices without the goal of weight loss. She explains research showing that you can be fit even if you are fat, since inactivity is what is linked to heart disease and other issues, rather than simply being fat. Scritchfield even advises taking a hammer to your scale, which sounds rather fun.

 The Body is Not an Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor 

Sonya Renee Taylor reminds us that there was a time in our lives when we didn’t judge ourselves for our appearance. She examines the origins of the shame most of us feel about our bodies, and tells us we don’t need to apologize for the way our bodies exist in the world. We need to not only stop hating our own bodies, but also need to understand how we perpetuate body shaming against others. She offers insight on how to change what we tell ourselves, see things from a new vantage point, and start living in the present, with the bodies we have. In her words, “radical self-love demands that we see 

Susan Erhardt has been a youth librarian at Kent District Library since 1992. When she’s not at work she loves to walk, travel with her family, read, and scrapbook.