Improve Your Health & Wellness in 2024: Top 5 Book Recs From an RD

A review of my recommended books for the Intuitive Eating and Body Neutral lifestyle to kick-start the new year!

Hi, I'm Meagan! Anti-diet dietitian, intuitive eater, and book-lover. Heavy emphasis on the anti-diet!

The new year is a highly anticipated fresh start for many, and unfortunately, it is also a time when the media is saturated with dieting ads, weight loss supplements, and health influencers selling "magical" green powders. (what's really in that stuff anyways?)

Oh yes, the influencers come out from the cracks with all of their "new and improved" wellness advice and start taking shots of apple cider vinegar or tell you to eat cauliflower pizza crust because low-carb is "healthier".

Isn't it ironic that we are told by influencers to eat more whole foods and get rid of "ultra-processed" ones, yet they push highly processed powders and expensive supplements in our faces at the same time?

Hmmmm.

On a more positive note, the new year is a wonderful opportunity (and sometimes the best motivation) to reassess your goals and refocus your energy into realistic self-improvement strategies. I am reviewing my five absolute favorite anti-diet and self-improvement books for you to read this year to get you in the right mindset (and off of the typical new year's crash dieting cycle!)

Before we get started, here are a few important reminders:

1. Self-improvement does NOT always equal weight loss.

2. Your weight exclusively does NOT define your health.

3. If crash diets worked, we wouldn't keep re-starting them every January.

Happy reading :)

Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach (E. Tribole & E. Resch)

OK. You guys knew this was coming.

But in all seriousness, this is an amazing book. I shamelessly re-read this every year for fun, and I refer to it's material every session with clients. It's a great place to start with the anti-diet approach; not only because they are the literal inventors of the intuitive eating approach, but because the book covers all of the principles in detail, complete with a Q&A section at the end. Amazing. Even if you are not completely "sold" on the anti-diet approach yet, I promise you will learn things about yourself when reading this book that you never knew!

Boundaries (H. Cloud & J. Townsend)

This book will help you take back control of your life (literally). It's SO important to practice boundaries when it comes to eating, and although this book does not directly address nutrition and the anti-diet, it certainly shares some of the same mindset advice and principles for self-improvement.

Self-Love Workbook for Women (M. Logan)

I love this book so much, I gifted it to my clients last holiday season. This is an incredible workbook filled with self-assessment, goal setting, reflection, and other exercises to help you improve your self-esteem and practice self-care. When it comes to self-care, nourishment of the body is at the top of the list, so you can see how this relates!

I take a body-neutral approach to improving self-esteem, and as you can imagine, this also, in turn, greatly improves nutrition behaviors. This book does a wonderful job of using that approach.

Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-being, and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating (C. Harrison)

Harrison does an excellent job discussing diet culture and the negative effects it has on all of us in this book. She uses evidence-based information and personal experience, which makes this read extremely relatable and incredibly moving.

*Side note: she also has a podcast called Food Psych. There's your "bonus" recommendation! :)

Body Kindness (R. Scritchfield)

This anti-diet book is both practical and inspiring. Scritchfield focuses on four principles of body kindness, and includes both mind and body exercises throughout. If you are looking to pursue both joyful movement and become more of an intuitive eater, this one is for you.

Now...who's ready to un-diet in 2024?!

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