The Body Liberation Project: How Understanding Racism and Diet Culture Helps Cultivate Joy and Build Collective Freedom

When Chrissy King first walked into a gym, she had one goal: to get skinny. This seemingly simple objective pulled her into an endless cycle where no matter what she achieved, there was always something about her body, her appearance, herself that needed changing. But it was within this pain of perpetual inadequacy that she realized the most liberating truth: she was not the problem. Diet and fitness industries rooted in white supremacy were the problem; Eurocentric and carefully manufactured beauty standards were the problem; discourses telling her that happiness was directly tied to physical appearance were the problem. From this recognition, she created an actionable method to redefine our relationship with our bodies, achieving a sense of self-worth completely separate from appearance. Published in March 2023 by Tiny Reparations Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, The Body Liberation Project is not just a book about self-love but a manifesto on achieving collective liberation by understanding racism, diet culture, and systemic oppression.

Chrissy King is a writer, speaker, strength coach, and educator committed to creating a diverse and inclusive wellness industry. With degrees in Social Justice and Sociology from Marquette University, she merges her passion for social justice with her love of fitness to empower individuals within the fitness and wellness industry. Before becoming a full-time personal trainer, she spent ten years in senior management at the Department of Veterans Affairs, helping homeless veterans. But she ultimately found this work, while meaningful, insufficient to satisfy her hunger for transformation. In 2018, she took the leap into full-time fitness coaching, but her approach differs radically from the traditional fitness industry. Rather than helping clients “lose weight” or “get the perfect body,” she helps them build healthy relationships with their bodies, find movement and eating practices that work for them, and understand the systemic roots of body image issues. Her work has been featured in SELF, SHAPE, Health, Cosmopolitan, BuzzFeed, and other media, establishing her as an important voice in the anti-diet culture and body liberation movements.

The core argument of The Body Liberation Project is both simple and revolutionary: body positivity is not enough; what we need is body liberation. The body positivity movement encourages people to “love your body,” “embrace your curves,” “you are beautiful.” These messages sound positive, but Chrissy points out they still tie value to appearance. Body positivity still requires you to look at your body and find it beautiful, still centers appearance in self-worth. Body liberation goes further, asserting you do not need to find your body beautiful to have value and dignity. Your worth lies not in your appearance but in your essence as a human being. Body liberation means recognizing you are so much more than your body, that your self-worth is completely independent of your weight, size, or appearance.

But Chrissy also recognizes that body liberation cannot be merely a personal project. We cannot simply tell everyone to “love yourself” or “not care what others think” and expect systemic problems to disappear. The reality is that society constantly bombards those who fall outside Eurocentric beauty standards—Black people, fat people, trans people, disabled people, elderly people—with messages that they are not attractive enough, valuable enough, or human enough. This is not just a matter of individual prejudice but systemic oppression rooted in white supremacy and capitalism.

Chrissy meticulously traces how diet culture and the fitness industry intertwine with racism and colonialism. Modern standards of “health” and “beauty” are not natural or universal but historically constructed, particularly to support white supremacy. During the colonial period, European colonizers used bodily differences to justify racial hierarchies, claiming African, Indigenous, and Asian bodies were somehow “primitive” and “uncivilized,” needing “improvement” to meet European standards. This logic persists today: white, thin, cisgender, able-bodied bodies are seen as “ideal” and “normal,” while all other bodies are viewed as deviations requiring correction.

The diet industry—a multi-billion-dollar global enterprise—builds on these standards. It sells not just weight loss products but an ideology: you are not enough as you are, but if you buy this product, follow this plan, achieve this weight goal, you will become more valuable, happier, more worthy of love. This ideology particularly targets women, especially women of color, who face double or triple oppression: sexism, racism, and if they are fat, fatphobia. Chrissy shares her own experience as a Black woman—being told not only that she needed to be thinner but that her natural hair, her skin color, the shape of her body were all “wrong.” Dieting and fitness became an attempt at assimilation, trying to get closer to white feminine standards, but no matter how hard she tried, she could never fully conform because these standards were never designed for her.

Chrissy also reveals the politics of the “health” concept. The fitness industry claims to care about health, but it actually cares about appearance. “Health” is equated with thinness, and fatness with unhealthiness, despite scientific evidence showing the relationship is far more complex. More importantly, obsession with “health” is often used as moral judgment against fat people—if you are fat, it must be because you are lazy, lack willpower, do not care about yourself. This moralization ignores countless factors affecting weight and health: genetics, socioeconomic status, access to healthy food and safe exercise spaces, stress, trauma, medical conditions, medications, and more. It also ignores the fact that even if health were one’s responsibility (itself a problematic assumption), weight does not equal health; thin people can be unhealthy, and fat people can be healthy.

A particularly powerful chapter explores how “losing weight for your health” discourse has become an acceptable form of fatphobia. When people say “I’m concerned about your health,” they are actually saying “I think your body is wrong and needs changing.” This supposed “concern” is actually a form of control and shaming, assuming fat people do not know or care about their own bodies and need to be “saved” by outsiders. Chrissy insists that genuine health care means respecting everyone’s bodily autonomy, supporting their access to healthcare, nutritious food, safe communities, and mental health resources, rather than shaming them or forcing them to conform to a particular weight standard.

Chrissy also explores privilege and exclusion in fitness culture. Traditional gyms are often hostile spaces for those who do not fit the ideal body type—particularly fat people, trans people, disabled people, and elderly people. Advertisements show thin, muscular, young, white bodies; equipment is designed for certain body sizes; trainers often lack training to work with diverse clients; the culture is filled with fatphobic comments and shaming. For many marginalized people, gyms are not spaces of empowerment but spaces of trauma. Chrissy shares her work as a strength coach trying to create genuinely inclusive fitness spaces—training coaches to recognize and combat their biases, advocating for accessibility and diverse representation, helping clients find forms of movement that make them feel good rather than punishing their bodies or pursuing appearance goals.

Strength training, particularly powerlifting, was crucial to Chrissy’s personal journey. She found that lifting weights transformed her relationship with her body—not because it changed how her body looked but because it changed how she viewed her body. In weightlifting, the focus is not on how the body looks but what it can do. When she could lift heavier weights and complete harder movements, she began appreciating her body’s strength and capability rather than criticizing its appearance. Lifting gave her a sense of control and accomplishment completely independent of her weight or size. She began seeing her body as a tool, an ally, a source of strength rather than an object needing control or shame.

But Chrissy also acknowledges that even her love of strength training could not shield her from systemic oppression. As a Black woman in the fitness world, she still faces racism and sexism—being underestimated, objectified, having her expertise questioned. She describes experiences of being ignored by white male trainers, having clients assume she is not “qualified” enough, feeling unsafe or unwelcome in fitness spaces. Her experiences remind us that while personal empowerment is important, it cannot substitute for systemic change. We need to change not just individual attitudes but institutions, policies, and cultural norms.

The Body Liberation Project not only diagnoses problems but provides practical tools and exercises. Each chapter includes reflection questions, writing prompts, and activities to help readers examine their beliefs, identify their internalized oppression, and begin building new relationships with their bodies. Chrissy encourages readers to engage in self-reflection: where do your beliefs about your body and others’ bodies come from? What messages did you learn from media, family, peers? How do these beliefs affect your behavior and self-worth? How might you be unintentionally perpetuating harm to others?

She particularly emphasizes the importance of examining privilege. If you hold thin privilege, white privilege, cisgender privilege, or able-bodied privilege, you need to recognize how these privileges have shaped your experiences and how you might—even unintentionally—perpetuate systems that exclude and harm marginalized bodies. This is not about creating guilt but cultivating awareness and accountability. Chrissy writes that body liberation must be collective—recognizing that none of us are free until all of us are. This means working not only for our own body liberation but also to dismantle systems oppressing all marginalized bodies.

The book also includes concrete suggestions for practicing body liberation in daily life: curate your social media, unfollowing accounts that make you feel bad about yourself; challenge negative body talk in your mind; find forms of movement that feel good rather than punitive; eat based on hunger and fullness rather than rules or calorie counting; treat your body with respect and care regardless of its size or shape; speak up and take action for justice for marginalized communities.

Chrissy is also honest about the difficulty of this journey. Unlearning decades of conditioning does not happen overnight. You will have bad body image days, you will fall into old habits, you will question yourself. And in a culture constantly telling you your body is wrong, maintaining body liberation is an ongoing struggle. But Chrissy reminds us this struggle is worthwhile because the stakes are not just personal comfort but collective freedom and justice.

From a feminist theory perspective, The Body Liberation Project is a powerful application of intersectional feminism. Chrissy demonstrates how identities of gender, race, body size, sexuality, and disability interweave to create unique patterns of oppression and privilege. She refuses to view body image issues as merely personal or psychological problems, instead situating them within the systemic context of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism. Her analysis is rooted in understanding how power operates, who benefits from the status quo, and how to challenge and transform oppressive systems.

The book also embodies feminist principles of body politics and bodily autonomy. Feminism has long advocated for women’s control over their own bodies—whether in reproductive rights, sexual autonomy, or freedom from violence. Chrissy extends this tradition to the realm of body image and health, insisting that everyone has the right to decide how they want to treat, adorn, and inhabit their bodies without external judgment or coercion. She challenges the ways the medical-industrial complex, beauty industry, and fitness industry attempt to control and regulate bodies, particularly marginalized bodies.

For readers everywhere, The Body Liberation Project offers profound insights on beauty standards, body image, and systemic oppression that resonate globally. While Chrissy’s specific experiences are rooted in an American context, particularly Black women’s experiences, the themes she explores—impossible beauty standards, diet culture’s toxicity, body commodification, the need for collective rather than merely personal solutions—are cross-cultural. Every culture has its own beauty standards and thriving diet and beauty industries that similarly sell “you are not enough, but our products can fix you” messages. Chrissy’s analysis of how these standards are socially constructed, how they serve power and profit, and how to resist them can apply to any cultural context.

Chrissy’s emphasis on the necessity of systemic change is particularly relevant in contemporary discussions. In an era when body positivity has become popular on social media, it is easy to think the solution is simply to “love yourself” or “embrace your body.” But Chrissy reminds us that while personal empowerment is important, it is insufficient without systemic change—transforming media representation, challenging discriminatory policies, dismantling white supremacy and capitalism. True body liberation requires collective action and structural transformation.

The Body Liberation Project is also a celebration of self-love and self-care as political acts. In a world attempting to make marginalized people hate themselves, loving yourself, caring for yourself, and insisting on your value is radical rebellion. But this self-love cannot be selfish or isolated—it must extend to care for others and commitment to justice. Chrissy invites us to build a world where everyone can live freely and comfortably in their bodies, where value is determined not by appearance but by humanity.

Chrissy King’s The Body Liberation Project is a powerful work that is simultaneously personal and political, inspiring and practical. It challenges us to rethink not only our relationship with our own bodies but also what beauty, health, value, and freedom mean. For anyone who has struggled with body image, grown tired of diet culture, or wants to understand how body politics connects to racism and systemic oppression, this book is essential reading. It reminds us that body liberation is not just about personal peace but collective justice—recognizing that none of us are free until all of us are. As Chrissy writes: “Your liberation is tied to mine.” This is an invitation to all of us—to examine our privilege, challenge oppressive systems, and together build a world where all bodies are respected, valued, and liberated.