5 Books to Help Heal your Body Image
If you are struggling with body image, you are not alone. These 5 books can help you feel more connected to your body, as well as less alone in your struggle to get there.
3 min read
Approximately 80% of women and 35% of men are dissatisfied with their bodies. These feelings of dissatisfaction and shame affect our mental health. Negative body image can exacerbate symptoms of anxiety or depression and escalate to eating disorders and body dysmorphia. At the very least, negative body image can cause a disconnection from your subjective embodied experience, which limits the ability to live a fully actualized life. These books are resources to help you understand and improve your relationship with your body.
It’s so easy to internalize the voices and influences from dominant culture that say the only way to escape the difficult feelings of negative body image is to constantly strive for that perfect body. This is a perceived solution that there are infinite resources for from fashion magazines to wellness culture, but these don’t ultimately mend the original wounds. Luckily, there has been a recent proliferation of resources to combat these dominant messages and to help people rebuild their relationships with their bodies.
Below is a list of relevant books for a journey to body acceptance. They range from cultural critiques, to self-help books, and memoirs. They represent a variety of viewpoints and creators from different backgrounds and social locations intentionally. There is no one pathway back to your body, and for some people these resources are helpful on part of their journey, but not another. All of these experiences are valid! If you are reading this and struggling with your body image in a way that is impeding your mental health and or safety, I encourage you to reach out to a mental health professional. While these resources are helpful, you don’t need to go it alone.
Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative
Melissa Febos
“There is no pain in my life that has not been given value by the alchemy of creative attention.”
This book encourages the reader to approach their body with rigorous attention, curiosity, and creativity. Simultaneously, it acknowledges all of the ways we’re encouraged to devalue our embodied experiences. Written with a feminist lens, it tackles female sexuality, desire, and the ways in which the female bodily experience is often devalued or ignored. Written as a guide for writers to bring the experiences of their body into their work, it is also a helpful tool for reflecting on and reclaiming the story of one’s own body.
Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia
Sabrina Strings
“The fear of fatness is the fear of the unknown, the unknowable, the uncontrollable.”
Our body image is not created in a vacuum. This book written by sociologist Sabrina Strings traces the roots of cultural fat-phobia to anti-Blackness, displaying through cultural analysis the way the thin ideal emerged as a way to distinguish whiteness from Blackness, rich from poor, and virtuous from sinful. Spanning from the renaissance and the slave trade, to the modern “obesity” crisis that often targets and shames the Black population, Strings makes a clear case for the ways in which the thin ideal is a political and sociological project that we all become implicated in.
While Black bodies are the main focus, all races are pulled into this project, having to perform whiteness in contrast to Blackness through diet and exercise. Taking in resources such as this book, brings a focus out to a wider lens. It can help to see the ways in which our negative self-talk might align with our broader social conditioning unknowingly. Then the work becomes to question if those are the values we want to align ourselves with.
The Body is not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self Love
Sonee Renee Taylor
“Living in a female body, a Black body, an aging body, a fat body, a body with mental illness is to awaken daily to a planet that expects a certain set of apologies to already live on our tongues. There is a level of ‘not enough’ or ‘too much’ sewn into these strands of difference.”
This book and the companion workbook are an excellent resource for taking that next step from understanding the ways in which culture impacts body image, to including steps to begin to accept your body for all its flaws, and connecting it back to the broader social good such self-acceptance can generate. Taylor is an activist and poet, and she speaks eloquently to the ways in which we are often encouraged to be small and the glorious freedom of letting ourselves take up space and stop apologizing for our flaws. Taylor’s poetic powers remind us that diversity and difference are to be celebrated.
Heavy: An American Memoir
Kiese Laymon
“I will wonder if the memories that remain with age are heavier than the ones we forget because they mean more to us, or if our bodies, like our nation, eventually purge memories we never wanted to be true.”
This memoir illustrates vividly the ways a body can be used to process what the conscious mind cannot. Laymon takes the reader through his life story beginning as an only child in Mississippi and through his experiences with abuse, eating disorders, institutional racism, and a gambling addiction. He breaks our conception of who has eating disorders or body image issues. It can be healing for feelings of shame to realize you are not alone. A lot of work about body image excludes men, or people of color. Laymon shows, instead of tells, us about the ways in which class and food scarcity can affect body image and eating disorders. He also illustrates the ways in which we learn to take in affection and nurturing from our caregivers teaches us how we love and care for ourselves.
Reclaiming Body Trust
Hilary Kinavey MS, LPC, and Dana Sturtevant, MS, RD
“Before you can root into something more nourishing and affirming of your entire being. The work is to begin from shame and perfectionism.”
Written by a therapist Hilary Kinavey and dietician Dana Sturtevant, Reclaiming Body Trust, helps readers investigate, “what is keeping you from feeling at home in your body?” Built around their treatment modality, their work is based on the belief that all of us are born feeling comfortable and accepting of our bodies. It is our life experiences that teach us to judge and shame our bodies. Which in turn, causes us to lead smaller, disembodied lives.
Their approach recognizes that diet culture and fatphobia, as terrible and harmful as they are, can feel very organizing for people. They acknowledge the bravery and grief required to enter the unknown, and find your way back to yourself. They offer a clear but flexible framework to contain and support readers mending their relationship with their body.