As a social worker, this book has been so valuable when having conversations with peers or clients. Easy to read, well organized. Definitely recommend picking up!

This book was phenomenal and I want everyone I know to read it. While some of the information was not new to me since I have read a lot of similar books, the way it was presented was fresh and left me with a lot to think about.

CW: racism, anti-fat rhetoric, anti-gay rhetoric

This such an important read for anyone working in health care, or anyone who wants to better understand how our health care system was built systemically to fail many of our friends and family members. Pick this one up, you won’t be disappointed

While I know I am not the representative target audience, I really really enjoyed this and will be getting a copy of it to read and share. Really well done and needed.

“Systemic oppression is a deadly preexisting condition.”

This was so much more then a book about diets. I feel liberated from reading it. This book was all amazingly written and I was constantly highlighting passages, and sharing them. I’ve recommended this book to several people already. This book was about wellness in every sense of the word, and how to go about achieving that also acknowledging the systematic road blocks that femme presenting, queer, and BIPOC people face while even trying to get basic care for the most simple needs. The exercises the author included were straightforward, easy and helpful. This was a really great read I very highly recommend it!

*a copy of this book was provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review*

i couldn't finish this on time (netgalley arc), but the book made me question about: to whom the self-hate serves? Why do we think we are not bodily well? or beautiful? It is rooted in white supremacy and i kind of havent thought about my weight ever since... I need to read the whole thing.

I was so looking forward to reading this book! However, I could not figure out how to adjust the sizing and didn't end up finishing it due to this issue. From what I did read, I enjoyed it and look forward to reading the rest.

The intersection of wellness and social justice was a blessedly necessary read. The realities of wellness are that it is not a welcoming community - Decolonizing Wellness tears that down and rebuilds it in a way that we needed.

An important and necessary read, given the false narratives that exist about health in our world. I loved the writing tone, and the book was overall accessible without being overwhelming.

Dalia Kinsey has created a beautiful resource for QTBIPOC people with Decolonizing Wellness. As a dietitian actively rejecting the European white-centered diet culture, Dalia details how marginalized communities can take back their autonomy around food and reject the dominant diet culture that so often harms Queers, Trans, Black, Indigenous People of Color.

While I’m not a member of the book’s intended audience, having experienced disability throughout my life, a lot of the discourse on general marginalization resonated with me.

Addressing trusting your body’s signals, prioritizing pleasure in eating, and how to recognize microaggressions and trauma responses, this is a much-needed and essential guide to anyone looking to guide themselves through decolonizing their food and self-love habits.

Full of journalling prompts to complete in the moment and over time, this book should be part of a larger collection of tools to regain self-love and liberation in a society that is constantly feeding QTBIPOC harmful and counter-intuitive messaging.

Dalia Kinsey opens this book by talking about how white, heteronormative, and cisnormative most wellness books are and how the aim of the book was to be there for the people who don't fit in those narrow crevices. This book absolutely accomplished that. It was full of helpful tips and information showing not just how to be well but why we are unwell and how focusing on our wellness is an act of rebellion.

A quote that encapsulates the message and writing style of this book is "Our goal is not immortality through kale smoothies and carrot juice. We are here to live full, joyful, authentic lives. Any practice that we decide to take into our lives needs to be in alignment with that purpose. Instead of living under the delusion that we can achieve immortality through 'good behavior,' it is far more empowering to focus on treasuring the lives we have."

The only problems I found were that at times the writing seemed inaccessible, a bit too academic if someone wasn't familiar with this language. I also found the beginning to be a bit disorganized and repetitive, but it definitely improved in the second half.

Overall, this is a great read for people who want a wellness book that is culturally informed and understands how society impacts our health. I'm so excited for any future book Dalia Kinsey might release!

I loved this book! I loved that it offered action based journaling prompts and guides that were accessible, inclusive, and presented in a way that was not pretentious, too schmaltzy, or hard to understand. This is a great read for folks who are fans of "The Maintenance Phase" podcast and want to dig deeper about the lies the dieting industry has been serving us.

After having multiple unsettling (and perhaps unproductive) conversations with friends about weight gained during the pandemic and how we do not feel at home in our bodies, it was refreshing to be reminded that a book like this can exist to help me feel at home in my body again and to approach food in a way that is healthy without going on a metabolic damaging diet. It also helped me understand how my gender identity has failed to serve me in how I view my body.

As a white passing cis-woman, I understand and love that this book was not written primarily for me but for folks of all identities (particularly for queer black people and queer people of color). I haven't read many books written with this kind of inclusivity in mind. It was very helpful in developing my understanding in how to understand and regard bodies in writing and conversation. I'm so used to reading books presented in a heteronormative manner that it boggled my mind that I am 32 years old and this was my first book that showed me these topics addressed inclusively.

This is the first book like this that I have been fortunate enough to come across, so I jumped at the chance to read it. For the first time in my life I felt as if I was being noticed, instead of being lumped in with some medical "standards" I had never fully fit into. The book breaks apart the heteronormative and white-centered aspects of the medical field - which, honestly, are most of the medical field. It also addresses the harmful heteronormative and white-centered diet industry. All of this felt very affirming and almost comforting. I also greatly enjoyed the added bonus of the idea of ancestor worship at the end, because connecting with those who came before and who have gifted you with life has always been important to me.

All-in-all, this book was exactly what I needed and I feel it will also comfort, uplift, encourage, and help others.

“Self-love is a survival skill, not a luxury for the privileged.”

Please note that I am a white queer reviewer and that this book’s audience is primarily QTBIPOC readers.

Decolonizing Wellness is a wonderful book full of healing messages for all marginalized people working to unpack the damage done by heteropatriarchal white supremacy and to move past. Dalia Kinsey writes with insight and compassion on a variety of topics, with a focus on self-love and body liberation.

The final chapter, which focus on honoring your ancestors’ dreams of freedom, felt especially liberatory to me, especially as it introduced me to the idea of chosen ancestors. I’m going to be thinking about that chapter for a long time, I think.

While some of the information presented in this book felt a bit basic as someone who has already been on a decolonization journey, I don’t think I’ve encountered another published book that would serve as an introduction to body liberation as well as this one does.

I did have some minor issues with the language used in this book at certain points. It was the sort of thing that I see online—like the use of the meaningless term “femme-identifying” in an effort to be inclusive when other language would have been more precise—but I think it’s worth noting that Kinsey’s approach to certain issues is occasionally somewhat imprecise and messy.

Overall, I would highly recommend this book to anyone who has been failed by mainstream discussions of wellness. I’m also delighted to learn that the author has a podcast and will definitely be checking it out!

This is an accessible overview of several mental health and mindfulness-based practices tied together through a decolonial lens - focused on radical self-love in a Eurocentric, white supremacist world and calling out the ways racism, queerphobia and transphobia have material impacts on health and wellbeing. As a white cis bi lady, I'm not the primary intended audience here, and I think any opinions I had should carry that caveat. For me, the framing of the book was its biggest strength, naming the patterns and structures that convince Black and indigenous people, particularly queers, that they're less worthy and then blaming them for the ensuing health issues. That said, the exercises within the book felt a little broad - Kinsey draws on practices/philosophies including mindfulness, healthy at any size, intuitive eating and several others, leaving this feeling a bit like a sampling menu of wellness practices. There are resources and notes in the back of the book for people wanting to learn more, but she doesn't always call out in text what logical next steps would be or how someone who wanted to explore deeper might go about doing so.

This book is a must-read for anyone sick of white-centric concepts and messages of wellness, and a much welcomed volume of affirmation and love for QTBIPOC folks seeking to rediscover and re-center their well-being after being marginalized by the health industrial complex and society at large for so long.

DECOLONIZING WELLNESS's incisive and no holds barred critique of white supremacy-fueled wellness got me nodding and going "yesss" on almost every page. It's very refreshing to see the author tell it like it is, reiterating the fact that racism, inequality, and inequity are systemic issues, not personal ones. The intersection of race theories, gender, bodies is intriguing, and the journaling breaks are a great way to offer a practical outlet for the book's ideas, instead of merely limiting it as theoretical concepts, although there are minor typos and grammatical errors.

I truly hope this book finds success, because the world and QTBIPOC folks definitely need it.

I have a complicated relationship with food and my body, and hoped to learn things from this book that would both help me approach my own relationship to food better and also to continue to unpack harmful food ideologies that are rooted in racism and misogyny. Dalia Kinsey is a black nutritionist, and this book work reflects both lived experience and expertise. Decolonizing Wellness not only fills an important need but also does so in a way that is accessible and kind. I read an ARC of this book through NetGalley, and would definitely recommend purchasing the book when it comes out in two weeks.

Decolonizing Wellness by dietitian Dalia Kinsey aims to help QTBIPOC (Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, People of Color) folks reject diet culture and restrictive ideas about bodies and food in order to find greater self-love and self-acceptance. The author, who identifies as a genderqueer, pansexual person of colour, wrote this book to fill a gap in resources on body positivity and food freedom for people with marginalized identities.

While I’m not a member of the book’s intended audience, I was interested in the idea of wellness through a social justice lens, plus I like to spread the word about resources for marginalized groups. And I’m anti-diet culture, and I thought the author had a great perspective on that.

The book begins by addressing the significant negative health effects of stress related to racism, oppression, and being regularly faced with microaggressions. The author characterized systemic oppression as a “deadly preexisting condition.”

The author calls out diet culture, laying out reasons why “dieting should be avoided like the plague.” She explains the harms that dieting can cause, and addresses the issue of predatory marketing and the role of the almighty dollar in driving the diet industry.

The book also addresses the moralization of fatness and the way health disparities in communities of colour get blamed on the “obesity crisis” and people’s health behaviours. She described the attitude among the dominant culture that people of colour are “just so hopelessly not white that they struggle to fully adopt Whole Foods as the solution to all their problems.” That made me laugh, but I think that the "Whole Foods is the answer" kind of attitude also feeds into other problems like orthorexia.

Binge eating and the use of food to self-soothe are framed as stress responses to the disease of systemic oppression. The author advocates for a very different approach from dieting and trying to target fatness; instead, she advocates for getting in touch with your body and improving your relationship with food. Eating is presented as a form of self-care, and the author encouraged mindful eating. There’s also a chapter on trusting your body that explores getting to know how your body signals hunger and fullness, as well as differentiating between physical and emotional hunger.

The book also addresses body shame and offers a variety of strategies to help to liberate yourself from that shame, including embracing joyful movement.

There are chapters that address prioritizing pleasure and developing self-love, all of which are presented in the context of dealing with oppression and internalized invalidating messaging. The author explains that there’s “no magical tool for dealing with pain that doesn’t involve confronting and experiencing your feelings,” and encourages finding a therapist who celebrates your marginalized identities.

The final chapter focuses on honouring your ancestors’ dreams of freedom for their descendants by embracing your racialized identity and rejecting white beauty standards.

The book has “journaling break” sections interspersed throughout, with prompts for self-reflection. The author emphasizes that making changes isn’t just about thinking; it’s about following through with actions.

While some books bout wellness can be kind of fluffy, there’s nothing fluffy at all about this book. It acknowledges and validates that readers are faced with a lot of difficult experiences, while at the same time offering hope that liberation is possible. The author challenges a lot of conventional wisdom around what is expected of people’s bodies and what it means to be healthy, and I think it offers a very liberating perspective for people feeling oppressed by that kind of messaging.

The book’s primary audience is QTBIPOC folks, but I think there’s a lot of good stuff here for anyone who feels like oppression related to marginalized identities has affected their relationship with food and their bodies. It was a really interesting read.



I received a reviewer copy from the publisher through Netgalley.

A great guide with easy to follow expiations and intriguing strategies. I read it all in about a week. A great read for anyways who wants to learn more about wellness.

I received an ARC of this from Netgalley in return for my honest review.

This was easily 4.5 stars. The writing was well done - open, inviting, and engaging in a way that much body positivity literature is not. This covers a portion of the population often forgotten in the bodypos movement, and does it extremely well.

As a white woman, much of this was not written for me personally, but did give opportunities for me to reflect on how better to support those around me. I couldn’t recommend this more highly to other white folks, to further decolonize your own thought processes and recognize the pockets of time and culture when you should step back and remove yourself.