.jpg)
I’ve got my nose in a book these days.
In fact lately I can be found walking down the sidewalk reading at the same time (you know a book is really good if you can’t even put it down when you walk, right)!
The books inspiring me these days are all about finding our way to self-love and finding peace with our body and our inner critic….essentially books to inspire me (and you) on our journey to being our own beloved.
The book that has me all consumed this week is Coal to Diamonds, a memoir by Beth Ditto and co-written by one of my favourite memoirists Michelle Tea. Here’s one of my favourite paragraphs in the book to give you a glimpse of it!
.jpg)
This is just the beginning of a body-positive book kick that I’m starting, perhaps even making this the summer of reading body-positive books. If you haven’t heard the term body-positive before…it refers to learning to love your body here and now (not focusing on our happiness or self-love being something that will happen only if we change ourselves).
So much of the reading of body-positive or healthy-at-every-size reading I’ve done has been online and to be honest I hadn’t realized how many of the creators of these same websites I had been reading had incredible books out there.
The next book to be devoured from cover to cover was Two Whole Cakes by Leslie Kinzel and oh my gosh this paragraph changed my life forever (and the book is SO good).
.jpg)
While my body-positive approach is subtle within the Be Your Own Beloved classes, it is one of my core values. I want you to know that you don’t need to save self-portraiture until you are a certain size or until you make some sort of change you are seeking. In fact it is most useful now, to start seeing yourself with kindness today…we truly don’t need to wait for anything before we start seeing ourselves with love….it is actually indeed available to us in this very moment if we show up in it and choose to.
Part of my intention to read more body-positive books is to keep doing my work, to deepen my own feeling of worthiness and being at home in my own body. So I thought I’d share with you some of the books on my summer reading list! One thing helping this book adventure too is…the library! In Vancouver we have this amazing iPhone App for the library where you can use it to put books on hold and I’m going wild with it. Even if your library doesn’t have an App, it might have some of these books (so you don’t even need to spend money to get reading)!
So maybe body-positive books feel like something you’d like to explore so I wanted to share some of my favourites with you. Do you have some big reading plans for the summer (fiction? non-fiction? your own theme for summer reading?) or some body-positive books I haven’t listed that you loved? Do tell!
Oh, and if you’re in for some adventuring into self-love through self-portraiture, I have a new session of Be Your Own Beloved coming this August!
1. Beautiful You: A Daily Guide to Radical Self-Acceptance
by Rosie Molinary.
2.Health At Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight
by Linda Bacon
3. The Unapologetic Fat Girl’s Guide to Exercise and Other Incendiary Acts
4. Two Whole Cakes: How to Stop Dieting and Learn to Love Your Body
by Leslie Kinzel
5. Coal to Diamonds: A Memoir
by Beth Ditto
6. Lessons from the Fat-o-sphere: Quit Dieting and Declare a Truce with Your Body
by Kate Harding and Marianne Story.
7.Hot & Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love & Fashion
by Virgie Tovar
8. Learning to Love Yourself, Revised & Updated: Finding Your Self-Worth
by Sharon Wegscheider-Cruse