Weight and Wisdom: Reflections on Decades of Working for Body Liberation

Weight and Wisdom: Reflections on Decades of Working for Body Liberation (publication day January 1, 2025) edited by Nancy Ellis-Ordway and Tigress Osborn, foreword by Caleb Luna, is the essay collection that has been missing in body liberation literature.

Tigress and Nancy, and others, have collected dozens of personal essays from activists and therapists who have been working in the body image, eating disorder treatment, health at every size, and fat liberation movements, some since the beginning of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) in the late 1960s. As Caleb Luna writes in the foreword:

This is the book that bears witness to the ancestors and elders who have been pushing the needle from the beginning.

The essays vary widely, from firsthand accounts of the early years of NAAFA by Bill Fabrey and the fat liberation activism coordinated by Marilyn Wann in the 1990s, to the racism encountered by black, fat activists, such as the Rev. E-K Daufin, PhD, trying to work in the same space, to personal and professional journeys in the eating disorders field and how it has evolved over time. What ties them all together is the continuing, never-ending work against anti-fat bias and diet culture, one of its cornerstones.

Many of the essayists addressed the failure of those working in the movement to include the issues of BIPOC fat persons, and the tensions between queer and straight women, issues that have also plagued white feminism.

I was less interested in the accounts of those who have worked in the eating disorder field, although I know that it is important and necessary work.

I hadn’t known about Pearlsong Press, and Peggy Elam, the publisher of the collection, whose motto is “healing the world, one book at a time,” and which aims to publish fat-positive fiction and nonfiction. I was especially inspired by her essay, because she started the publishing company for a similar reason why I started this blog in 2021. Having been obsessed with books for my entire life and not finding any good online resource that flagged anti-fat bias in books, I thought that reviewing books and promoting those that are fat-positive, and flagging those that contain anti-fat bias was something that I could do to raise awareness and make it easier for people looking for fat positive books to find the books they want to read. 216 posts later, here we are!