Body Positivity

It is worrying to think that most girls feel dissatisfied with their bodies, and that this can lead to serious problems including depression and eating disorders. Can some of those body image worries be eased? Body image expert and psychology professor Dr. Charlotte Markey helps girls aged 9-15 to understand, accept, and appreciate their bodies. She provides all the facts on puberty, mental health, self-care, why diets are bad news, dealing with social media, and everything in-between.

Girls will find answers to questions they always wanted to ask, the truth behind many body image myths, and real-life stories from girls who share their own experiences.

Through this easy-to-read and beautifully illustrated guide, Dr. Markey teaches girls how to nurture both mental and physical heath to improve their own body image, shows the positive impact they can have on others, and enables them to go out into the world feeling fearless!

Spoken word poet Alok Vaid-Menon challenges the world to see gender not in black and white, but in full color. Taking from their own experiences as a gender-nonconforming artist, they show us that gender is a malleable and creative form of expression. The only limit is your imagination.

What does it mean to be beautiful? How can a girl embrace and develop her individuality and unique qualities when the world is constantly comparing her to the plastic perfection of Barbie?

Body Positive: A Guide to Loving Your Body is the number one resource for young adult women who desire to redefine and understand true beauty. Focusing on correct body image, self-improvement, thinspiration, mental health, bullying, sexual harassment, and more, Body Positive is packed with introspective questions and inspiring, un-retouched photographs that display the bodies of real, everyday women. Body Positive is a helpful, informative and inspirational guide that will help any girl transcend society’s standards.

It’s time to ditch harmful, outdated beauty standards and build real, lasting body positivity. It's time for a self-love revolution!

Every day we see movies, magazines, and social media that make us feel like we need to change how we look. This takes a toll on how we think about ourselves—and how we allow others to treat us. And while many teens feel shame about their body, being a teen girl of color can be hard in unique ways. Maybe you feel alienated by the mainstream image of beauty, which is still thin, white and able-bodied. In addition to that, you may also feel pressure from within your community to measure up to a different—but equally unfair—beauty standard. So, how can you start feeling good about yourself when you’re surrounded by these unrealistic—and problematic—ideas about your body?

In The Self-Love Revolution, leading body image expert and creator of #LoseHateNotWeight Virgie Tovar offers an unapologetic guide to help you question popular culture and cultivate radical body positivity. With this groundbreaking book, you’ll identify and challenge mainstream beliefs about beauty; understand the unique tools girls of color have to counter negative body image; and build real, lasting body empowerment. You’ll also learn how to call out diet culture, and discover ways to move beyond your own inner critic and start building the unconditional love for yourself that you deserve.

It’s time to explode society’s beauty standards, stop messing with diets, wear what you want, and recognize that your body is your business. This book will help you find your way to radical body positivity, one step at a time.

The definitive collection of art, poetry, and prose, celebrating fat acceptance

Chubby. Curvy. Fluffy. Plus-size. Thick. Fat. The time has come for fat people to tell their own stories. The (Other) F Word combines personal essays, prose, poetry, fashion tips, and art to create a relatable and attractive guide about body image and body positivity. This YA crossover anthology is meant for people of all sizes who desire to be seen and heard in a culture consumed by a narrow definition of beauty. By combining the talents of renowned fat YA and middle-grade authors, as well as fat influencers and creators, The (Other) F Word offers teen readers and activists of all ages a guide for navigating our world with confidence and courage.

In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em. Now, Gender Queer is here.

Maia's intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fanfiction, and facing the trauma of pap smears. Started as a way to explain to eir family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual, Gender Queer is more than a personal story: it is a useful and touching guide on gender identity--what it means and how to think about it--for advocates, friends, and humans everywhere.

The message we receive from the world is clear: we’re not good enough. We’re not skinny enough, pretty enough, smart enough. Women is all about accepting ourselves. Carol Rossetti asks us instead to say, “We’re not good enough—we’re even better.”

Despite the progress we’ve made as a society, there is still a cruel and subtle gender oppression that exists today—and many don’t realize it’s there. In response, Rossetti decided to draw women to focus on the issues we face. Her illustrations are of women who feel safe expressing themselves by showing the world their fashion, sexuality, relationships, religion, disabilities, and even traumatic experiences.

Rossetti’s commanding images belong on billboards and street corners and in schools and offices to remind us that our unique experiences and expressions should make us feel beautiful, intelligent, and proud. We have the power to embrace who we are and can stop trying so hard to please the rest of the world. Carol Rossetti and Women offer us a vision of who we can be.

Seeing Gender is an of-the-moment investigation into how we express and understand the complexities of gender today. Deeply researched and fully illustrated, this book demystifies an intensely personal—yet universal—facet of humanity.

Illustrating a different concept on each spread, queer author and artist Iris Gottlieb touches on history, science, sociology, and her own experience. This book is an essential tool for understanding and contributing to a necessary cultural conversation, bringing clarity and reassurance to the sometimes confusing process of navigating ones' identity.

Whether LGBTQ+, cisgender, or nonbinary, Seeing Gender is a must-read for intelligent, curious, want-to-be woke people who care about how we see and talk about gender and sexuality in the 21st century.

It’s time to bare it all about bodies!

We all experience the world in a body, but we don’t usually take the time to explore what it really means to have and live within one. Just as every person has a unique personality, every person has a unique body, and every body tells its own story.

In Body Talk, thirty-seven writers, models, actors, musicians, and artists share essays, lists, comics, and illustrations—about everything from size and shape to scoliosis, from eating disorders to cancer, from sexuality and gender identity to the use of makeup as armor. Together, they contribute a broad variety of perspectives on what it’s like to live in their particular bodies—and how their bodies have helped to inform who they are and how they move through the world.

Come on in, turn the pages, and join the celebration of our diverse, miraculous, beautiful bodies!

Growing up as a fat girl, Virgie Tovar believed that her body was something to be fixed. But after two decades of dieting and constant guilt, she was over it―and gave herself the freedom to trust her own body again. Ever since, she’s been helping others to do the same.

Tovar is hungry for a world where bodies are valued equally, food is free from moral judgment, and you can jiggle through life with respect. In concise and candid language, she delves into unlearning fatphobia, dismantling sexist notions of fashion, and how to reject diet culture’s greatest lie: that fat people need to wait before beginning their best lives.