We all know that we live in a deeply fatphobic society. Netflix's recent America’s Next Top Model documentary took us back to the early 2000s when it was considered appropriate to scold young, impressionable women for not having perfectly flat stomachs, with Tyra Banks telling one of the already very thin contestants that she should “watch what she eats”. It’s not an overstatement to say that body positivity didn’t really exist in the 2000s. But in the 2010s, we witnessed what I would now describe as a flawed but radical movement towards body positivity. 

This movement was not perfect, as Lindsay King-Miller wrote for Bitch in 2014: “Today’s body positivity focuses too much on affirming beauty and not enough on deconstructing its necessity.” But compared to how far we have regressed, the 2010s starts to look like a lost haven. Today, it has become normalised to refer to oneself or others as a “big back” – a comment often made when a person thinks they’ve overeaten or wants to eat unhealthily – and to see former curve models and actresses become thinner and thinner. Speaking to a wider cultural saturation, there were several advertisements about GLP-1 medicines for weight loss and diabetes at the recent Super Bowl. The most alarming featured tennis legend Serena Williams, who stated that she is “healthier on Ro”, the membership-based telehealth platform that offers access to GLP-1.

Alongside the normalisation of Ozempic and other weight loss drugs, we are witnessing the resurgence of fatphobia in both overt and covert ways, and we all have a responsibility to reject this. If you are also sick of our deeply fatphobic society and want to unlearn your own bias and challenge others, we’ve compiled a short reading list about fatness, body image, eating disorders and food. 

TELL ME HOW YOU EAT: POWER AND THE WILL TO LIVE, AMBER HUSAIN

Today we are encouraged to take weight loss pills and injections that make us uninterested in food. But even before GLP-1s, we were already living in a world, as Amber Husain argues in her new book, Tell Me How You Eat Power and the Will to Live, that made eating easy for some and hard for others. Husain challenges our normative understanding of eating disorders and highlights the ways that social inequalities makes us sick and disinterested in eating, but my favourite part of the book is when Husain writes about food and its erotic and generative potential.

She writes about a scene from Audre Lorde’s book Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, where she attended a party held by Black lesbians: “Here the liquor flows viscous and heavy: gin, bourbon, scotch and various mixers stand opened, the bar less dotted than swamped with delicacies of all descriptions. Most important, there is a platter of fried chicken wings, a pan of potato-​­​­and-​­egg salad dressed with vinegar, and a huge central platter of beef arranged over a pan of cracked ice. The room is ‘alive and pulsing with loud music’.” If you have complicated feelings around food and are looking for possible answers, this is the book for you. 

DEAD WEIGHT: ESSAYS ON HUNGER AND HARM, EMMELINE CLEIN 

Husain and Clein’s books both speak to one another. Dead Weight challenges dominant narratives around dieting and fatness, with Clein arguing that the real danger might not be fatness itself, but the constant cycle of dieting. She points to research showing that many studies linking fatness to poor health fail to account for confounding variables, most notably the prevalence of weight cycling among people categorised as “obese”. A 2019 study from Columbia University, for example, found that women with a history of “yo-yo” dieting had more cardiovascular risk factors than those who maintained a consistent weight, regardless of whether that weight was considered “healthy”. Clein concludes that much of what’s reported as data on the dangers of fatness may, in fact, reflect the harms of chronic dieting. It is an eye-opening read. 

FAT SWIM, EMMA COPLEY EISENBERG

Fat Swim is yet to be released, but it is one of my most anticipated reads for 2026. Unlike the other books on this list, it is the only fiction novel – a collection of linked stories about different fat people which explores the contradictions, joys and violence of the modern world. The blurb states that: “For better or for worse, these stories counsel, none of us can leave our bodies behind: they remind us what it is to be alive.” 

BELLY OF THE BEAST: THE POLITICS OF ANTI-FATNESS AS ANTI-BLACKNESS BY DA’SHAUN L HARRISON

Belly Of The Beast: The Politics Of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness by Da’shaun L Harrison is an essential read for understanding the connection between anti-fatness and racism. The fat, Black, disabled and non-binary writer highlights the state-sanctioned murders of fat Black people, the ways anti-fatness and anti-blackness show up in everyday life, and more. The book tackles many topics, from desirability politics to attempts to challenge our cultural understanding of fatness as bad. 

HUNGER: A MEMOIR OF (MY) BODY BY ROXANE GAY

Roxane Gay is one of my favourite writers. She’s not the kind of writer to avoid complication – she sees it and runs straight towards it, as you can see in her 2017 book Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. She is not interested in making anyone feel better or good about their bodies, because this is her story. It’s a sad and challenging read, where Gay writes about being raped at the age of 12 by her boyfriend and several of his friends, and how this experience has impacted her relationship with her body and with food. Gaye explicitly responds to the world’s disgust with her body type and much more.

THE BODY IS NOT AN APOLOGY BY SONYA RENEE TAYLOR

Rather than parroting liberal feminist self-help rhetoric around loving oneself and one’s body, The Body Is Not An Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor highlights how radical self-love cannot exist without social justice. The book highlights how we exist within a system that profits from making us hate our bodies and writes about how we combat this terror. The Body Is Not An Apology is now in its second edition and shows how racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia and fatphobia are all interconnected. 

THE FAT LIBERATION ARCHIVE 

Created by Dr Carlie Pendleton, the Fat Liberation Archive is a digital collection of ephemera from over fifty years of fat liberation activism in the UK. The archive includes zines, flyers, articles, and audio recordings.