If you’re on a journey toward a more peaceful relationship with food and your body, books can be some of your most powerful companions. They help you feel less alone, challenge the diet culture messages you’ve absorbed for years, and give you a new framework for understanding yourself.
Here are some of our favorite books we recommend — ones we genuinely return to, recommend to clients, and believe in.
Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-Being, and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating
By Christy Harrison, MPH, RD
If you’re new to the weight-inclusive world, start here. Christy Harrison is a registered dietitian and one of the leading voices on diet culture, and this book is a thorough, science-backed dismantling of the wellness industry’s most harmful myths. She covers the history of diet culture, the research on weight and health, and what an alternative — rooted in intuitive eating and body respect — can actually look like. Equal parts infuriating and liberating.
Also: Christy’s Food Psych Podcast is free and fantastic — hundreds of episodes on all of these themes.
Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach
By Evelyn Tribole, MS, RDN & Elyse Resch, MS, RDN
The original. First published in 1995, Intuitive Eating introduced the framework that so much of weight-inclusive nutrition is built on: 10 principles for reconnecting with your body’s natural hunger and fullness cues, making peace with food, and letting go of diet culture’s rules.
If you’ve heard the term “intuitive eating” and want to go deeper, this is the place to start.
The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love
By Sonya Renee Taylor
This is one of those books that shifts something fundamental in how you see yourself and the world. Sonya Renee Taylor writes about radical self-love — not as a feel-good affirmation, but as a practice of dismantling the systems that teach us to be at war with our bodies.
Honest, poetic, and deeply compassionate. Essential reading for anyone who has ever felt shame about the body they live in.
Thick: And Other Essays
By Tressie McMillan Cottom
A National Book Award finalist, Thick is a collection of essays that explores race, beauty, body, and belonging in America — written with brilliance, humor, and unflinching honesty.
While it isn’t a nutrition book, it’s one of the most illuminating explorations of how bodies are politicized and judged, particularly Black women’s bodies. It belongs on this list because understanding body image means understanding the culture that shapes it.
Read the full version on Substack.