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

by Shana Minei Spence MS RDN CDN

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 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 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.

Genres: Health, Audiobook

253 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 13, 2024

Reviews

[Trish · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed it and I struggle with whether to give it a 4 but I may settle on 3. I think I did feel some disappointment with this book, there just wasn't as much as I was hoping for, but maybe what I hope for is impossible. As I raise a pre-teen daughter, I worry so much about how not to pass down my own internalized fatphobia and disordered eating habits and how to teach a girl to love herself. In that journey, I've sought out body positive media. One of my favorites being the podcast "Nutrition for Mortals" which is hilarious and great, and which featured Shana Spence in an episode, leading me to this book.

But as with Nutrition for Mortals, in this book too what I always struggle with is how to not have that aesthetic goal in a society that punishes fat people all the time. I've read Roxane Gay, Lindy West, all of it, and this book had some light advice about eating, but as I was reading it I mainly wondered "but how do you get to the place where what you want isn't an aesthetic goal?" The latter part of the book spoke about this but I felt like the order should be reversed.

But in the end I don't know that a book can ever cover that topic, of how to fight decades of body hatred and disordered eating (which, I have to think that most women raised in my generation struggle with in one form or another). So my expectations may just be too high. Because this isn't the funny sort of memoir or critique that Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman is (fantastic), or Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, or my last foray and currently reading Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia. Reading it did not make me necessarily feel at peace with food, banish body shame, or reclaim joy. Most of that I have been working on for years already, but I'm not sure this book helped a lot in that journey.

Still, I appreciate Spence's perspective and love her on social media. It's just that I didn't feel fulfilled from this book, but my hopes were perhaps too high.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Would be a 3.5 really. I enjoyed this and it actually helped with some twisted thoughts about food and eating I have been having. I especially appreciated the intersectionality and the central message that it's all really about money - in fact, I would have liked for that message to be even more central and a bit more fleshed out. Parts of the book felt a bit repetitive or a bit slapdash, but if you're looking for a first step to repair a bad relationship with food and dieting (and who doesn't have that nowadays, really), I would certainly recommend this. I also recommend following the author @thenutritiontea on social media, because she's great, informative and hilarious.

[Rebecca Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's so nice to hear someone say we actually need to eat for health, that diets don't work and that it's okay to like food that tastes good. I'm not used to hearing about such common sense around food.

[Janine · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good information, but the writing style wasn’t for me. Repetitive

[JD · Rating 5 out of 5]

An easy to read book full of useful information, that sort of feels like you are having a convo with a very supportive friend, who really just wants you to have the snack you are craving!