It Was Me All Along

Fat Girl Walking: Sex, Food, Love, and Being Comfortable in Your Skin...Every Inch of It

Brittany Gibbons · 240 pages

"I hope you buy 'Fat Girl Walking' because I want to start a conversation. Or continue a conversation, one I inadvertently started a while ago when I took my clothes off on a stage in front of 700 people. A lot of people thought I was awesome for doing that. A lot of others thought a size 18 woman had absolutely no business showing off her body. Unfortunately for them, I've made it my personal mis

Beautiful Bodies

Kimberly Rae Miller · 222 pages

Blending social history and personal experiences, an exploration of how people try to control their bodies with food reveals the struggle everyone experiences with their own bodies.

Moose: A Memoir of Fat Camp

Stephanie Klein · 310 pages

With her signature acerbic wit and captivating insight, the author of the wildly popular Straight Up and Dirty offers a powerful and beautifully stark portrait of adolescenceWhile she is pregnant with twins, one sentence uttered by her doctor sends Stephanie Klein reeling: "You need to gain fifty pounds." Instantly, an adolescence filled with insecurity and embarrassment comes flooding back. Thoug

Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

Roxane Gay · 320 pages

“I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe. I buried the girl I was because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. . . . I was trapped in my body, one that I barely recognized or understood, but at least I was safe.” In her phenomenally popular essays and long-running Tumblr blog, Roxa

Such a Pretty Fat: One Narcissist's Quest to Discover If Her Life Makes Her Ass Look Big, or Why Pie Is Not the Answer

Jen Lancaster · 379 pages

Unfortunately, being overweight isn't simply a societal issue that can be fixed with a dose healthy of positive self-esteem. It's a health matter, and on the eve of her fortieth year, Lancaster learns to make changes. Because what good is finally being able to afford a pedicure if you lose a foot to adult onset diabetes?

When You Eat at the Refrigerator, Pull Up a Chair: 50 Ways to Feel Thin, Gorgeous, and Happy {When You Feel Anything But}

Geneen Roth · 220 pages

Geneen Roths pioneering books were among the first to link overeating and compulsive dieting with deeply personal issues that go far beyond weight and body image. Now, in this fun, practical book, she helps readers radically shift their relationships with food and find more life-affirming ways to care for themselves. With an exhilarating combination of intelligence and wicked good humor, she offer

Wake Up, I'm Fat!

Camryn Manheim · 289 pages

Actress Camryn Manheim discusses how being fat has affected her life, how she learned to accept herself, and how she is helping other plus-sized women increase their self-confidence.

Autobiography of a Face

Lucy Grealy · 230 pages

Lucy Grealy's ruthless self-examination, rich fantasy life, and great derring-do inform this powerful memoir about the premium we put on beauty and on a woman's face in particular. It took Lucy twenty years of living with a distorted self-image and more than thirty reconstructive procedures before she could come to terms with her appearance after childhood surgery left her jaw disfigured. As a you

How to Be a Woman

Caitlin Moran · 313 pages

Though they have the vote and the Pill and haven't been burned as witches since 1727, life isn't exactly a stroll down the catwalk for modern women. They are beset by uncertainties and questions: Why are they supposed to get Brazilians? Why do bras hurt? Why the incessant talk about babies? And do men secretly hate them? Caitlin Moran interweaves provocative observations on women's lives with l

Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works

Evelyn Tribole, Elyse Resch

"First published in 1995, Intuitive Eating has become the go-to book on rebuilding a healthy body image and making peace with food. We have all been there, angry with ourselves for overeating, for our lack of willpower, for failing at yet another diet. But the problem is not us; it is that dieting, with its emphasis on rules and regulations, has stopped us from listening to our bodies. Written by

Hungry: A Young Model's Story of Appetite, Ambition, and the Ultimate Embrace of Curves

Crystal Renn · 256 pages

Bet Me

Jennifer Crusie · 363 pages

From the back cover: Minerva Dobbs knows that happily-ever-after is a fairy tale, especially with a man who asked her to dinner to win a bet. Even if he is gorgeous and successful Calvin Morrisey. Cal knows commitment is impossible, especially with a woman as cranky as Min Dobbs. Even if she does wear great shoes and keeps him on his toes. When they say good-bye at the end of their evening, they

Half-Assed: A Weight-Loss Memoir

Jennette Fulda · 300 pages

The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl

Shauna Reid · 400 pages

A hilarious and heartwarming tale of a real-life superhero who battled the bulge and won.In January 2001 Shauna Reid was twenty-three years old and twenty-five stone. Determined to turn her life around, she created the hugely successful weblog The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl and, hiding behind her Lycra-clad roly-poly alter-ego, her transformation from couch potato to svelte goddess began. Toda

The Beauty Myth

Naomi Wolf · 348 pages

In the struggle for womenʼs equality, there is one hurdle that has yet to be fully cleared-the myth of female beauty. It challenges every woman, every day, by seeking to undermine psychologically and covertly the material freedoms that feminism has achieved for women. And, fueled by new technology in media and medicine, its ravages are reaching epidemic proportions. The Beauty Myth cuts to the roo

Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight--and What We Can Do about It

Harriet Brown · 288 pages

"Over the last 25 years, our longing for thinness has morphed into a relentless cultural obsession with weight and body image. You can't be a woman or girl (or, increasingly, a man or boy) in America today and not grapple with the size and shape of your body, your daughter's body, other women's bodies. Even the most confident people have to find a way through a daily gauntlet of voices and images

Stick Figure

Lori Gottlieb · 230 pages

After happening upon the diary she kept when she was 11 years old, Gottlieb was moved to publish this chronicle of her struggle with anorexia nearly 20 years after she wrote it. In the late 1970s, she lived with her parents and brother in Beverly Hills, where Gottlieb's loneliness and concern about looking attractive to boys swiftly transformed into an obsession with dieting, although she had neve

Dietland

Sarai Walker · 320 pages

Plum Kettle does her best not to be noticed, because when you’re fat, to be noticed is to be judged. With her job answering fan mail for a teen magazine, she is biding her time until her weight-loss surgery. But when a mysterious woman in colorful tights and combat boots begins following her, Plum falls down a rabbit hole into the world of Calliope House — an underground community of women who rej

Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body

Courtney E. Martin · 330 pages

Draws on original research and more than one hundred interviews with patients, psychologists, and nutritionists to analyze the pervasiveness of eating disorders and body-image-related emotional challenges in today's generation of young women.

The Good Body

Eve Ensler · 95 pages

Botox, bulimia, breast implants: Eve Ensler, author of the international sensation The Vagina Monologues, is back, this time to rock our view of what it means to have a "good body." "In the 1950s," Eve writes, girls were "pretty, perky. They had a blond Clairol wave in their hair. They wore girdles and waist-pinchers. . . . In recent years good girls join the army. They climb the corporate ladder.

Huge

Sasha Paley · 272 pages

When Wilhelmina and April find themselves roommates at a fat camp, both with very different goals, they find they have very little in common until they are both humiliated by the same person. April and Wil couldn't be more different, but both of them are spending the summer at Wellness Canyon -- otherwise known as a weight-loss camp. April knows that if she could just drop a little weight, she wou

Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

Lindy West · 272 pages

Coming of age in a culture that demands women be as small, quiet, and compliant as possible--like a porcelain dove that will also have sex with you--writer and humorist Lindy West quickly discovered that she was anything but. From a painfully shy childhood in which she tried, unsuccessfully, to hide her big body and even bigger opinions; to her public war with stand-up comedians over rape jo

The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things

Carolyn Mackler · 288 pages

Feeling like she does not fit in with the other members of her family, who are all thin, brilliant, and good-looking, fifteen-year-old Virginia tries to deal with her self-image, her first physical relationship, and her disillusionment with some of the people closest to her.

The Body Project:: An Intimate History of American Girls

Joan Jacobs Brumberg · 267 pages

Girls today are in crisis - and this book shows why. Drawing on a vast array of lively historical sources, unpublished diaries by adolescent girls, and photographs that conjure up memories of the past, The Body Project chronicles how growing up in a female body has changed over the past century and why that experience is more difficult today than ever before. Girls' bodies have certainly changed