📚 Body Trust Book Club - Week 7

This Week: Feb 23–Mar 1 | Chapters 10, 11 & 12 [The End!]

Wow — here we are, the home stretch! 🏁 This week’s chapters are reflective, and full of really important reminders about movement, body trust, and healing that is bigger than any one of us. Grab your coffee, tea, or cozy warm or iced soothing beverage of choice… let’s dive in. ☕🌿

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💃 Chapter 10: Reclaiming Movement

I have a lot to say about this chapter//many fave quotes, so this chapter discussion is a bit lengthy!

I’m a big fan of Virgie Tovar, and this opening quote immediately resonated:

“Human beings need food and movement to survive. Diet culture steals food and movement, pathologizes them, then commodifies them back to us” (p240)

Yes. Absolutely. 👏

There is a LOT to unpack here, and it’s serious work.

Sadly, this aspect of healing is often ignored in traditional inpatient and residential eating disorder treatment. Even worse, many health care professionals in the eating disorder field have never examined or worked on their own relationship with movement. This means many people don’t get the support they deserve — and it deeply frustrates me.

⚡ Compulsive exercise / toxic fitness culture alert: Anyone who struggles to give themselves permission to rest or listen to their body when injured may be experiencing a compulsive exercise disorder. This is real and deserves attention.

Like the book's authors, I also often avoid the words “exercise” or “physical activity” because they carry so much baggage for people recovering from chronic dieting or disordered eating.

Some key quotes / highlights from this chapter:

“We may have positive memories of active play, sport, dance and other movement activities in our early childhood, but by the time we reach middle school, most if not all of us become aware of how our bodies ‘stack up,’ where we fall along the body hierarchy and whether or not we are part of an elite group” (p240)

“Whatever I choose will be enough. I will always be enough” (p245)

“How do you begin to decouple urgency and expectations from your ideas of movement?” (p245)

“What you feel drawn to do, enjoy doing, and what you are able to do will change over the course of your lifetime. And it should change if you are listening to and honoring your body as it ages… The relationship with movement is constantly changing” (p246)

“Just because an activity challenges you doesn’t mean it’s disordered or harmful. But when people do not like their bodies or are disconnected from their bodies for any reason, there can be a risk of pushing past pain, ignoring body signals, or doing things with an element of self-harm” (p247)

“It takes time to be conditioned to doing something — to build strength, flexibility, and endurance [especially after a period of pause/rest]. Don’t be an asshole to yourself. Start slowly. This is your body and we trust the process” (p249)

TLDR: This chapter could honestly be a whole book. The main takeaway: a full, compassionate pause and a then a slow, supported rebuild are essential for anyone healing their relationship with movement/re-building body trust. 🐢💛

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🌳 Chapter 11: Deepening Your Roots into Body Trust

Opening quote — worth bookmarking:

“For most humans, transformation does not seem achievable from the distant shores of another person’s life. From far away, transformation looks like a miracle or the result of magical powers possessed by the transformed person. Transformation is not magic. It's hard work. But it's also doable work.” – Sonya Renee Taylor, The Body Is Not an Apology (p255/6)

Other highlights:

“Nobody really knows where your body wants to be, where it is comfortable. The white dude that created BMI certainly didn’t know… but your body knows. And we trust your body to sort out the weight” (p255/6)

This chapter is less quotable and more of a summary/review, but a few things really stand out:

• Kindness offers a path forward — it’s an entry point to a relationship with yourself that you want to be in and can sustain (p261)

• Subheading: “Grieve, and then grieve some more” — a gentle reminder that grieving is essential, and it’s often necessary to do this in community or with professional support. You don’t have to figure it out alone.

• “This work is about healing, not fixing” (p276) 👏👏 — yes, exactly what I tell clients most days

Key principles for cultivating body trust (my favorites, bolded for emphasis):

• Work with the edges of your comfort zone

• Look and listen with kindness and curiosity

• Go for a C- (instead of an A)

• Locate yourself and widen the lens

• Find community and share your process

• Honor your self-preservation practices

The chapter also gives strategies for navigating challenging body days, which are tough for most people to access and act on. Here’s the list with some of my reflections woven in (p270-273)

• Acknowledge that this feeling is temporary — reminder: feelings come and go, and we don’t need to over-identify with them.

• Get curious about what else might be going on — notice triggers and patterns, not blame.

• Find a mantra and repeat it (e.g., “my body is not a project to solve”)

• Avoid body checking behaviors — even small reductions matter.

• No fixin’, no fixin’, no fixin’ — because trying to “fix” the body or control it often fuels the problem.

• Name systems of oppression that have infiltrated your consciousness and your body without consent

• Honor, normalize, feel, and express your anger — anger can be a compass for what needs to shift.

• Have compassion for the ways you are still healing from the experiences in your body story

  
  

Reminder: It’s normal to not be able to read these suggestions once and immediately act on them. Most people need repeated practice, experimentation, and often guidance to move from insight to action. Staying curious about where resistance comes up, and gently exploring what’s manageable, is often the most powerful part of the work. 💛

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🌟 Chapter 12: Making Your Healing Bigger Than You

My fave quotes:

“This struggle has not been your fault… no one asked your permission to put toxic thoughts about your body in your head” (p277/8)

“Collectively we need to get to the root of why eating disorders are notoriously long healing processes and treatment is not working well for most” (p280)

This quote really hits home for me: in my work with clients, everyone I have ever worked with tends to blame themselves when inpatient or residential programs don’t provide sustained change or support after discharge. There’s often no integrated support system, which can make recovery feel impossible — and it’s absolutely not their fault.

“There are always people recovering from eating disorders in your spaces. There are always people suffering in silence about their body story and size. Our communities need fat affirmation, not diet talk” (p282)

Yes! 👏 This is such an important reminder that healing is never just about us as individuals. It’s also about the spaces we inhabit and the messages we allow — or challenge — in our communities. Fat affirmation and body respect aren’t “nice extras,” they’re essential.

Another point I really want to lift up: the chapter calls out the systemic roots of eating disorders — how racism, ableism, anti-fat bias, and healthism shape the experience and access to care. This is not just personal work, it’s political work. Our healing matters, but it’s also intertwined with changing the world around us.

TLDR: Chapter 12 is a reminder that while we each do our personal work, our healing is bigger than just ourselves. It includes our communities, our systems, and the next person who might be silently struggling nearby. 💛🫶

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Congratulations!

We made it to the end. 🎉

This was a lot of material — it’s okay if you haven’t digested it all yet.

March will be a breather month, giving everyone time to slowly finish the book, reflect, and start or continue to integrate the themes of this book 📖

Looking ahead: I’m aiming for another book club pick in April. If you have books you’d love me to feature, let me know — and stay tuned for some online voting coming soon on Instagram: @monica.msw

Thank you for showing up, reading thoughtfully, and engaging with this material alongside me. Whether you read every word or skimmed, you’ve participated in a process that values curiosity, self-compassion, and community — and that’s exactly what this book club is about. 💛