Regardless of where you are in your own relationship with your body, one thing I think we can all agree on is that it can sometimes be challenging to love ourselves and the body we have right now.

To explore this topic, The Professional Book Nerds (PBN) have recorded multiple podcast episodes on body positivity and anti-fat bias. Authors Aubrey Gordon and Evette Dionne were interviewed about their newest books, and the PBN hosts devoted an entire episode to body-positive books for kids and teens.

As you’re also setting your reading goals for the year, consider adding some body-positive books to your list. To help you out, here’s a list of titles for readers of all ages that will help you learn to love your body, available in the Libby app.

Nonfiction & memoir

Things No One Will Tell Fat Girls by Jes Baker

This is a manifesto and call to arms for women of all sizes and ages. With smart and sassy eloquence, veteran blogger Jes Baker calls on women to be proud of their bodies, fight against fat-shaming and embrace a body-positive worldview to change public perceptions and help women maintain mental health.

Landwhale by Jes Baker

A heroine of the body image movement, Jes Baker offers an intimate, gutsy memoir about being a fat woman. A deeply personal take, this book is a glimpse at life as a fat woman today, but it’s also a reflection of the unforgiving ways our culture still treats fatness, all with Jes’s biting voice as the guide.

Hunger by Roxane Gay

With the bracing candor, vulnerability and power that have made her one of the most admired writers of her generation, Roxane Gay explores what it means to learn to take care of yourself: how to feed your hungers for delicious and satisfying food, a smaller and safer body and a body that can love and be loved in a time when the bigger you are, the smaller your world becomes.

You Have the Right to Remain Fat by Virgie Tovar

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.

What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon

Unlike the recent wave of memoirs and quasi self-help books that encourage readers to love and accept themselves, Gordon pushes the discussion further towards authentic fat activism, which includes ending legal weight discrimination, giving equal access to health care for large people, increased access to public spaces and ending anti-fat violence. As she argues, “I did not come to body positivity for self-esteem. I came to it for social justice.”

“You Just Need to Lose Weight” by Aubrey Gordon

The pushback that shows up in conversations about fat justice takes exceedingly predicable form. Losing weight is easy—calories in, calories out. Fat people are unhealthy. We’re in the midst of an obesity epidemic. Fat acceptance “glorifies obesity.” The BMI is an objective measure of size and health. Yet, these myths are as readily debunked as they are pervasive. Aubrey Gordon equips readers with the facts and figures to reframe myths about fatness in order to dismantle the anti-fat bias ingrained in how we think about and treat fat people.

The Body is Not an Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor

This book offers radical self-love as the balm to heal the wounds inflicted by our violent systems. World-renowned activist and poet Sonya Renee Taylor invites us to reconnect with the radical origins of our minds and bodies and celebrate our collective, enduring strength. As we awaken to our own indoctrinated body shame, we feel inspired to awaken others and to interrupt the systems that perpetuate body shame and oppression against all bodies.

Fearing the Black Body by Sabrina Strings

There is an obesity epidemic in this country and poor black women are particularly stigmatized. This is only the most recent incarnation of the fear of fat black women, which Sabrina Strings shows took root more than 200 years ago. Strings weaves together an eye-opening historical narrative ranging from the Renaissance to the current moment showing that fat phobia, as it relates to black women, did not originate with medical findings, but with the Enlightenment era belief that fatness was evidence of “savagery” and racial inferiority.

Weightless by Evette Dionne

A poignant and ruthlessly honest journey through cultural expectations of size, race, and gender—and toward a brighter future—from National Book Award nominee Evette Dionne. This unmissable portrait of a woman on a journey toward understanding our society and herself, Weightless holds up a mirror to the world we live in and asks us to imagine the future we deserve.

Belly of the Beast by Da’Shaun L. Harrison

Harrison—a fat, Black, disabled, and nonbinary trans writer—offers an incisive, fresh and precise exploration of anti-fatness as anti-Blackness, foregrounding the state-sanctioned murders of fat Black men and trans and nonbinary masculine people in historical analysis. Policing and disenfranchisement of fat Black men and trans and nonbinary masculine people are pervasive, insidious ways that anti-fat anti-Blackness shows up in everyday life.

Body positive books for kids and teens

Bodies Are Cool by Tyler Feder

This cheerful love-your-body picture book for preschoolers is an exuberant read-aloud with bright and friendly illustrations to pore over. A pure celebration of all the different human bodies that exist in the world, this book's joyful illustrations and encouraging refrain will instill body acceptance and confidence in the youngest of readers.

Starfish by Lisa Fipps

Ever since Ellie wore a whale swimsuit at her 5th birthday, she’s been bullied about her weight. To cope, she tries to live by the Fat Girl Rules—like “no making waves,” “avoid eating in public” and “don’t move so fast that your body jiggles.” And she’s found her safe space—her swimming pool—where she feels weightless. In the water, she can stretch herself out like a starfish and take up all the room she wants. With the support of her dad, therapist and neighbor buoying her, Ellie might finally be able to cast aside the Fat Girl Rules and starfish in real life—by unapologetically being her own fabulous self.

Taking Up Space by Alyson Gerber

Sarah loves basketball more than anything. And it’s the only thing that helps her ignore how much it hurts when her mom forgets to feed her. But lately Sarah can’t even play basketball right. She’s worried that changing herself back to how she used to be is the only way she can take control over what’s happening. She’ll have to dig deep to stand up for what she needs at home, be honest with her best friends and accept that she doesn’t need to change to feel good about herself. This novel promises to be a realistic and compelling story about struggling with body image and learning that true self-esteem comes from within.

My Eyes Are Up Here by Laura Zimmerman

This is a razor-sharp debut about a girl struggling to rediscover her sense of self in the year after her body decided to change all the rules. Hilarious and heartbreakingly honest, My Eyes Are Up Here is a story of awkwardness and ferocity, of imaginary butterflies and rock-solid friends. It’s the story of a girl finding her way out of her oversized sweatshirt and back into the real world.

Beautifully Me by Nabela Noor

From designer, creator, and self-love advocate Nabela Noor (@Nabela) comes a much-needed picture book about loving yourself just as you are. When Zubi sees her mother frowning in the mirror and talking about being “too big,” she starts to worry about her own body. As her day goes on, she hears more and more people being critical of each other’s and their own bodies, until her outburst leads her family to see what they’ve been doing wrong and to help Zubi see that we can all make the world a more beautiful place by being beautifully ourselves.

How Moon Fuentez Fell in Love with the Universe by Raquel Vasquez Gilliland

This Pura Belpré Award-winning novel is an irresistible romance starring a Mexican-American teen who discovers love and profound truths about the universe when she spends her summer on a road trip across the country.

A Dark and Starless Forest by Sarah Hollowell

Derry and her 8 siblings live in an isolated house, separated from the rest of the world by an eerie and menacing forest. Frank, the man who raised them after their families abandoned them, says it’s for their own good. After all, the world isn’t safe for people with magic. And Derry feels safe, until the night her sister disappears. Derry will risk anything to protect the family she has left, even if that means returning to the forest. Saving her siblings from the forest and from Frank might mean embracing the darkness. And that just might be the most dangerous thing of all.

Fat Chance, Charlie Vega by Crystal Maldonado

Coming of age as a Fat brown girl in a white Connecticut suburb is hard. Harder when your whole life is on fire, though. A sensitive, funny and painfully honest coming-of-age story with a wry voice and tons of chisme, Charlie Vega tackles our relationships to our parents, our bodies, our cultures and ourselves.

The Professional Book Nerds are Jill, Emma and Joe—book nerds who dish out expert book recommendations, author interviews and all things books on their weekly podcast. The Professional Book Nerds podcast is available through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, Radio FM and anywhere people download their podcasts.