Fat Liberation:
Start Here.
A curated reading list, podcast queue, and list of clinicians doing weight-inclusive work — because the gap in representation is real, and these people have been filling it for a long time.
This page exists because a listener asked us something we couldn't answer with four names in a podcast. She was recovering from RED-S, hitting PRs, gaining muscle — doing everything right — and still felt like every voice telling her to heal was in a thinner body than hers. She wasn't wrong.
We're not going to apologize for the bodies we're in. They carry their own stories. What we can do is point you toward people doing this work in a wider range of bodies, and toward the writers and activists who built the intellectual foundation that all of us are standing on — whether we know it or not.
This list is not exhaustive. It will grow. If we're missing someone essential, tell us.
People Who Built This Framework
The entry point. Body liberation as a political act rooted in radical self-love. Taylor argues that shame about our bodies is a tool of oppression — and that dismantling it is a collective project, not a personal one.
On anti-fatness as anti-Blackness. Essential for understanding how fat liberation is inseparable from racial justice — and why any version of this work that doesn't center Black fat people is incomplete.
The historical architecture underneath all of it. Strings traces how thinness became a racial and moral category — the academic deep dive that reframes every diet-culture conversation you've ever had.
Fatphobia as systemic bigotry. Tovar is concise, funny, and refuses to let you wait for a smaller body to start living. One of the most accessible entry points in the space.
Judy Freespirit and Sara Aldebaran. The document that started it. "A diet is a cure that doesn't work, for a disease that doesn't exist." Everything since is a footnote.
Gordon (also known as Your Fat Friend) writes about the lived experience of existing in a very fat body — the specific ways medicine, media, and public life fail fat people that thinner "body positive" voices often miss.
Showing Up in Endurance Sport
Has been visibly, unapologetically fat at the front of endurance sport for years. Her memoir is about running, yes — and also about what it costs to exist as a fat Black woman in outdoor spaces that weren't built for you.
Running marathons and ultramarathons in a fat Black body and writing honestly about what that's like. Follow her. She doesn't soften it.
Weight-Inclusive RDNs & Therapists
Brought HAES and anti-diet frameworks to a mainstream audience. The Food Psych podcast archive is enormous and genuinely useful. Her book Anti-Diet is a solid clinical and cultural overview.
Weight-inclusive dietitians who are funny and non-preachy about it. The podcast is a good place to start if you want clinical nuance without the lecture.
The weight-inclusive sports dietitian space has grown. Search the HAES Health Sheets provider directory or the Association for Size Diversity and Health (ASDAH) listings. Look for CSSD credential + explicitly weight-inclusive language.
The desire to change your body exists inside a system that economically punishes larger bodies, limits healthcare access by BMI, and floods every media channel with one body type. How do we separate genuine autonomous preference from internalized pressure? I'm not sure we fully can yet. What I want is to create the world in which that question could be answered freely.
Podcasts, Films & More
Aubrey Gordon & Michael Hobbes debunking wellness myths. If you're here, you probably already know this one. If you don't, start immediately.
Documentary examining how media shapes cultural attitudes toward fat bodies. Good overview of the landscape and the stakes.
Aubrey Gordon's writing on the lived experience of being very fat — the specific indignities and erasures that thinner people in the body positivity space often can't see.
Zines, flyers, audio recordings and organizing history from the fat liberation movement — 1970s to today. A people's archive.
The Fat Underground's collected essays, articles and poems. One of the earliest primary texts of fat activism. Dense and essential.
Not strictly fat liberation — but Laymon's memoir on body, Blackness, and family is one of the most honest books written about living in a body that others have opinions about.