Around 2005, I started to engage in fitness for the joy of it—no longer for the purpose of aesthetically altering my body. This was in the early days of Facebook and well before Instagram, so I hadn’t yet heard of the body-positive movement. Smartphones weren’t that popular yet, so frequently uploading images to social media really wasn’t a thing. Without this technology at our fingertips, representation of diverse bodies in fitness was basically nonexistent.
There simply wasn’t the opportunity to scroll social media for hashtags like #bodypositivefitness to see people who looked like me. Magazines at the time were painfully lacking in their representation of diverse bodies, so you were pretty much SOL if you didn’t look like the lean, “ideal” body type on those glossy pages.
At this point, I had a larger body, even though I had been active as a kid and as an adult. (And that, of course, is very normal). For many years, I had tried to fight this with dieting and more exercise with the sole purpose of trying to make my body smaller.
During this time—and even in the climate that lacked representation for people who looked like me—I still had a total “fitness transformation.” I didn’t lose any weight, and my appearance didn’t change drastically. What did change, though, was my mindset. And it changed dramatically. I finally started to embrace my own athleticism. I no longer cared about the numbers on the scale but looked instead to metrics related to my athletic ability.
The shift happened when I started working with a running coach who had a body like mine. She was the first person I knew with a similar body who was smashing her fitness goals without worrying about weight loss.
She lived like an athlete, and this changed everything for me. It also pushed me to see what other body-positive fitness resources I could find. I started to seek out other inspiration, and in those early days of social media, books became my go-to. Although books featuring diverse body types were still very lacking, I gravitated toward the few that were available. They were so helpful to me. Even if social media had been prevalent back then, it pales to books in one big way: Social media shows snippets, while books can tell the greater, fuller story, which can inspire people to relate others’ experiences to their own lives. These stories demonstrate possibility.
Little did I know back in 2005 that I would become an author of body-positive fitness books myself. The books I read had been so profoundly impactful that I made it my life’s work to pay it forward so I could help others experience fitness for all too.
Since body-positive fitness books have played a huge role in my own life, I wanted to share with you some of my favorites. I hope they can help you as much as they helped me!