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📚 reading list: everything they never taught you about your body (beyond sex)
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items I've spent most of my life at war with my body (being told your fat because your thighs touch in fourth grade can really f*ck you up). Counting calories, ignoring pain, pushing through exhaustion, and assuming that if something felt wrong, it was pro...
These books filled in the gaps my health classes and google searches never touched. Why we hate our bodies and who profits from that hate. Why women's pain gets minimized and misdiagnosed. What it means to live with illness that doesn't show up on te...
This list isn't about wellness trends or self-optimization.
It's about understanding the systems that taught you to distrust your own body — and unlearning them.
These books filled in the gaps my health classes and google searches never touched. Why we hate our bodies and who profits from that hate. Why women's pain gets minimized and misdiagnosed. What it means to live with illness that doesn't show up on te...
This list isn't about wellness trends or self-optimization.
It's about understanding the systems that taught you to distrust your own body — and unlearning them.
Sections
4
diet culture is a scam
the medical system wasn't built for you
living in a body that doesn't cooperate
reclaiming your body
diet culture is a scam
How the wellness industry profits from making you feel broken. These books trace the history of diet culture, expose the junk science behind it, and offer a way out of the cycle of restriction and shame.
Harrison is a registered dietitian who spent years recovering from her own eating disorder and now helps others escape the diet cycle. She breaks down how diet culture operates — the rebranding as "wellness," the junk science, the profit motive — and...
Anti-Diet: Reclaim Time, Money & Well-Being
Wolf's 1991 book argues that as women gained political and economic power, beauty standards tightened to keep us distracted and insecure. It's dated in some ways, but the core thesis holds up — the beauty industry needs you to feel inadequate. Unders...
The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf
Strings traces the origins of anti-fat bias to racism and the transatlantic slave trade. Thinness became a marker of whiteness, moral superiority, and self-control — and that legacy shapes how we talk about bodies today. Essential reading that connec...
Fearing the Black Body: Racial Origins of Fat Phobia
Bacon (now Lindo Bacon) is the researcher who developed the Health at Every Size framework — the idea that health behaviors matter more than the number on the scale, and that weight stigma itself causes harm. It's heavily cited, evidence-based, and a...
Health At Every Size: Truth About Weight
Dooner's book is funny, irreverent, and deeply practical. She walks through the biology of restriction, the mental load of chronic dieting, and what it actually takes to stop. If you need permission to eat the thing, this book gives it to you — with ...
The F*ck It Diet: Eating Should Be Easy
The book that started the intuitive eating movement. Tribole and Resch are dietitians who developed a framework for reconnecting with hunger and fullness cues after years of diet culture noise. It's structured, practical, and the opposite of another ...
Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole & Elyse Resch
the medical system wasn't built for you
Why doctors dismiss women, misdiagnose pain, and fail marginalized bodies. From clinical trials that excluded women to diagnostic criteria based on male symptoms, these books reveal a system that was never designed with you in mind.
Dusenbery documents the two ways medicine fails women: dismissing our symptoms as psychological, or ignoring us in research altogether. She covers everything from autoimmune diseases to heart attacks to chronic pain, and the pattern is damning. If yo...
Doing Harm by Maya Dusenbery
Criado Perez shows how a world designed around male bodies fails women — from car crash safety tests to drug dosing to urban planning. The medical chapters are infuriating: we're still using diagnostic criteria developed on men and wondering why wome...
Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World for Men
Comen is an oncologist who traces the history of women's medicine — from hysteria diagnoses to lobotomies to the current crisis of dismissal. She weaves patient stories with historical research, and the through line is clear: medicine has never taken...
All in Her Head by Elizabeth Comen
Cleghorn wrote this book while living with lupus that took years to diagnose. It's a history of how medicine has misunderstood, mistreated, and ignored women's bodies — from ancient Greece through the present. Meticulously researched and quietly enra...
Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis & Myth by Cleghorn
Villarosa examines why Black Americans die younger, get sicker, and receive worse care — and traces those disparities to racism, not genetics. She covers maternal mortality, COVID-19, environmental racism, and more. If you read Medical Apartheid on t...
Under the Skin: Hidden Toll of Racism by Villarosa
Norman spent years trying to get diagnosed with endometriosis while doctors told her nothing was wrong. This memoir is part medical mystery, part indictment of a system that doesn't believe women in pain. If you've ever been told your symptoms are "n...
Ask Me About My Uterus: Women's Pain Quest by Abby Norman
living in a body that doesn't cooperate
hronic illness, disability, and pain that doesn't get taken seriously. These memoirs and guides are for anyone who's been told it's stress, it's anxiety, it's all in your head — when you know something is actually wrong.
Ramey spent over a decade sick with something no one could diagnose — and this memoir is both her story and a broader look at the millions of women with chronic, contested illnesses. It's funny, angry, and devastatingly relatable. She calls it "WOMI"...
The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness
Khakpour's memoir chronicles her years-long journey to a Lyme disease diagnosis while navigating the American healthcare system as an Iranian American woman. It's fragmented and nonlinear, which mirrors the experience of chronic illness itself. Not a...
Sick: A Memoir by Porochista Khakpour
Miller was diagnosed with Crohn's disease in her twenties and wrote this book as a guide for the newly chronically ill. It's practical — how to talk to doctors, how to manage work, how to grieve your healthy self — but also deeply personal. The book ...
What Doesn't Kill You: Life with Chronic Illness
O'Rourke spent years sick with autoimmune issues that didn't fit neatly into any diagnosis. This book is part memoir, part investigation into why modern medicine struggles with chronic illness. She's a beautiful writer, and she takes the subject seri...
The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness
Bernhard is a former law professor who developed chronic fatigue syndrome and wrote this guide to living with illness that doesn't get better. It draws on Buddhist principles but isn't preachy — it's practical wisdom for pacing, acceptance, and findi...
How to Be Sick: Buddhist Guide for Chronically Ill
A slim, fierce book about fibromyalgia, sexual trauma, and the connections between them. Berkowitz writes in fragments, circling around pain and belief and what it means when your illness isn't "real" enough for medicine. It's poetic and angry and un...
Tender Points by Amy Berkowitz
reclaiming your body
Healing, embodiment, and learning to live in your body again. After all the heavy reading, these books offer frameworks for coming home to yourself — not through fixing or optimizing, but through acceptance and compassion.
Van der Kolk is a trauma researcher who's spent decades studying how trauma lives in the body — not just the mind. He covers everything from EMDR to yoga to neurofeedback, and makes the case that healing requires working with the body, not just talki...
The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk
The Nagoski sisters wrote this book about the burnout cycle — and how to complete it. Emily wrote Come as You Are (on the sex list), and this one tackles the stress that accumulates in women's bodies from living in a world that demands everything. Pr...
Burnout: Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Nagoski
The Body Is Not an Apology: Radical Self-Love
Gay's memoir about her body — how childhood trauma shaped her relationship with food and size, and what it means to live in a body the world treats as unacceptable. It's raw and uncomfortable and doesn't offer easy resolution. That's what makes it va...
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay
The Kite twins are body image researchers who argue that the goal isn't body positivity — it's body neutrality. They want you to stop thinking about how your body looks and start thinking about what it can do. A useful reframe if you're stuck in the ...
More Than A Body by Lexie & Lindsay Kite
Bacon's follow-up to Health at Every Size expands the conversation to include all marginalized bodies — not just fat bodies, but disabled, queer, and racialized bodies. It's about creating a world where all bodies belong, not just learning to accept ...
Radical Belonging by Lindo Bacon