Antonia Bernardin

I recently listened to You are not a before picture by Alex Light, this was my 5th read of the year and my first book in the challenge to read a little bit more non-fiction this year.

Book summary

This book delves into body image, diet culture, the history of diets as a concept and how to break free of the dieting cycle. It is full of personal anecdotes of Alex’s own journey with diet culture, which actually lead her to develop an eating disorder in her 20’s. Alex light is a fashion/ body positivity influencer who I had not actually come across before this. She has shared publicly on social media her journey into body acceptance and food neutrality and this book was published with the hope of consolidating a lot of the conversations she’s had in online spaces into one place. The book also includes quotes and passages from Doctors, psychologists, nutritionists and body positivity influencers from marginalised communities.

My thoughts

As there aren’t many pictures of me on this blog, let me get ahead of this and say, I am not slim. I occupy a mid – plus sized ish body and have never been thin, I have always been very sporty but at every level of fitness, I have always carried a bit of squish.

As I’ve explored in my yearly reflection post ‘Exercising without a weightloss goal‘ , I’ve already done a lot of the reflecting to undo diet culture’s grip on me and my own issues with body image. I did a lot of that on my own, not trusting online spaces to teach me this because I exist in a body that will always fundamentally be outside the norm and most ‘wellness’ approaches are diets in trench coats. I also began my journey staunchly anti-diet, thanks to how I’ve seen a parent’s experience in this space, so I never been on the toxic cycle of trying diet after diet. With that in mind, some parts of this book weren’t helpful for what I read it for: to stop chasing some version of my body that might never be, or a version of it that was 20 years old and didn’t work full time.

However, I do think this is a book I would love many people, mainly women, in my life to read, it breaks down how diets don’t work and they were never designed to (because how else would they continue to make money). It goes into the science behind how restrictive eating affects your metabolism and psychology long term but in a way that is digestible; not too sciencey, and not too wishy-washy. This is a book for the people having conversations that I hear in my office, or for the sad -tragic meals I see in the lunch room that oscillate in the spectrum of a pathetic little cup-o-soup to takeaways.

This book also tackles how to get out of the trap of comparing yourself to others, specifically people on social media. This isn’t an area I struggle with luckily as I never fell down this mental trap but I think it would be helpful advice for other people. I think this book is a good step one for anyone looks to break out of the cycle of dieting and body image issues.