Live Nourished: Make Peace with Food, Banish Body Shame, and Reclaim Joy

Summary

Reject diet culture, achieve a healthy relationship with food, and nourish your body and soul with this book from registered dietitian, nutritionist, and creator behind the Instagram @TheNutritionTea, Shana Spence.

In Live Nourished, Shana Spence starts by exposing diet culture for what it is: a patriarchal, capitalist mindset that robs people of their time, money, health, and joy. It’s a systemic belief that equates fitness, health, and thinness with worth and assigns food a moral value. And it’s a belief that pervades our society.

Spence’s arguments will open your eyes to the insidiousness of this mindset and will demonstrate how it’s infiltrated the health and wellness world, how to recognize it in all its sneaky forms, and how letting go of efforts to lose weight or eat “perfectly” actually helps to improve people’s health—no matter their size. Relayed through scientific evidence, case studies, and personal experience, Spence demonstrates why diets don’t work and provides you with a radical alternative to diet culture, one that prioritizes nourishing the body and soul and looks to bring joy.

To get there, Spence walks you through healing your relationship with food. Touching on concepts like intuitive eating and health at any size, Live Nourished provides you with a roadmap towards eating what works for you and helps you reclaim your body, mind, and life so you can focus on things that truly matter.

Spence’s thesis is simple: If we can learn to separate ourselves and our worth from diet culture, we can learn how to eat when we’re hungry, meet our body’s unique needs, and discover which foods give us pleasure—all while nourishing our bodies and souls in the process.