I walked away from this book very conflicted, and I don't mean that as a knock on the author - she gets people thinking. I'd actually come very close to calling this a must-read.

Although this is a somewhat random hybrid of memoir, self help and fat-acceptance essays, I think the combination works. She lives all of that in her daily life so it makes sense that they'd be intertwined in pseudo memoirs. I don't read her blog and wasn't familiar with her name, so her writing was all new to me and I found her voice to be a strong one, and her a person willing to explore the myriad issues facing women today. She covers most or all of them, from the harassment women face online (including the decision of a plus-sized advocate to undergo weight loss surgery) to doctors asking about comfort food when you're there for birth control meds, and beyond. I felt like I'd love hearing her give a talk as I had a number of ohhh shit moments.

I found myself doing a double take when she shared her evening looking at herself in profile and trying to suck in her gut to keep the balance that her breasts should be more prominent than her stomach and later when she hated all images from the bikini body shoot. I always looked at the HAES movement as body acceptance and I found myself wondering whether she was so anti Diet Culture that she refused to consider whether she'd be happier in her own skin if she lost some weight. I was also surprised at her quitting a dance class she was enjoying simply because someone said it looked like she might have lost some weight. Losing weight doesn’t need to be a goal for everyone, but she seemed to take avoiding it to an extreme.

I think she was conflicted, something she later revisited when questioning whether she should take meds her doctor prescribed for a chemical issue when they had the known side effect of controlling hunger. There's no easy answer to this. I like her idea of liberation vs. love.

My one real issue was toward the end when she referred to Diet Culture as "also known as 'That No-Fun Fatphobic Lifestyle". That's really not fair and I think goes against her tenet throughout the book that Person A is the only person with input on what Person A's body looks like and whether they're happy with that. If skinny person B should STFU about Fat Person A, then it applies the other way around too. No one should be generalized based on a scale number, fat or thin.

All in all a weighty read, but one I truly enjoyed and would recommend. Thanks, NetGalley