The Body Liberation Project: How Understanding Racism and Diet Culture Helps Cultivate Joy and Build Collective Freedom

From author and wellness personality Chrissy King, an exciting, genre-redefining narrative mix of memoir, inspiration, and activities and prompts, with timely messages about social and racial justice and how the world needs to move beyond body positivity to something even more exciting and revolutionary: body liberation.

When Chrissy King first joined a gym, she had one goal in mind: to “get skinny.” In pursuit of this goal, she fell into the all-too-common cycle of “not enough-ness”; no matter what she achieved, there was always something she felt she needed to change about her body, her appearance, herself. This made her realize the most liberating truth of all: She was not the problem. Diet and fitness industries rooted in white supremacy were the problem; Eurocentric and carefully manufactured beauty standards were the problem; discourses telling her that her happiness was directly tied to her physical appearance were the problem. So she created an actionable method to redefine the relationship we have with our bodies, thereby achieving a sense of self-worth that is completely separate from how we look.

The Body Liberation Project is about finding actual freedom in our bodies by discovering strength and aspects of fitness, movement, and eating that work for YOU. It’s about realizing that the goal is not to look at our bodies and love everything we see; it’s to understand that at our essence we are so much more than our bodies. But it’s also about recognizing the harsh realities that prohibit people in marginalized bodies from being able to do so. Society constantly bombards those who fall outside Eurocentric standards of beauty (think Black, fat, trans, etc.) with the message that they are less attractive, and part of the journey toward body liberation is examining your own privilege, acknowledging the harm you may be causing others, and mourning your old ideas about what a body “should” look like.

Recognizing that none of us are free until all of us are, Chrissy King shares the wisdom, the tools, and the inspiration to motivate readers to find body liberation and, even more important, to pass it on.