Aubrey Gordon’s ‘You Just Need to Lose Weight’ Is Our January Book Club Pick

Every January, the internet is abound with resolution content and self-improvement messaging. While some of the language has softened over time (perhaps you’ve swapped your “resolutions” for “intentions”) and more brands have begun to distance themselves from the ”new year, new you” rhetoric, the underlying point is often still there: The new year is an opportunity to reinvent yourself, typically in order to better fit in with standard ideals of what a person “should” look like.

That’s why this month’s SELF Well-Read Book Club pick felt like such an obvious and necessary choice. We’re so excited to be reading “You Just Need to Lose Weight”: And 19 Other Myths About Fat People by Aubrey Gordon together.

Gordon started writing anonymously as Your Fat Friend in 2016, publishing pieces on the cultural and historical landscape of fatness on platforms like Medium until she began her column on SELF, Making Weight, in 2019. In 2020, Gordon revealed her true identity in one of her columns: “I’m Aubrey Gordon,” she wrote. “I’m 37 years old, and I weigh 350 pounds. I’ve been waiting to meet you.” Around that time, Gordon released her first book, What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat, and launched her nationally-acclaimed podcast, “Maintenance Phase,” which she co-hosts with Michael Hobbes. You might also recognize Gordon from her hugely popular Twitter account, @yrfatfriend.

You Just Need to Lose Weight is divided into four parts, each of which encapsulates a common refrain about fatness: “Being Fat Is a Choice,” “But What About Your Health?,” “Fat Acceptance Glorifies Obesity,” and “Fat People Should….” Those sections are broken up further into chapters, all myths you’ve probably heard before, like “Any fat person can become thin if they try hard enough. It’s just a matter of ‘calories in, calories out,’” and “Obesity is the leading cause of death in the United States.” Gordon goes on to debunk each one with historical references, facts and data, and sharp, stinging commentary.

The message of this book is perennially important, but we hope that now, at a time of year when diet culture, fat bias, and a lack of self-compassion tend to trickle through our mental floodgates, it will act as a form of resistance to the very systems that created these cultural norms in the first place. What if we spent January not just not hating our bodies (and, in the process, discriminating against other people’s bodies, too), but actively unlearning those core beliefs about fatness and fighting them at their root? This month, we’ll do exactly that together.

What’s next?

Buy the book here. (Its official release day is January 10, but you can pre-order it now!)
Read an exclusive excerpt from You Just Need to Lose Weight here.
Check out our recommended reading list below for a bunch of SELF articles on fatness, size, and weight.
Save the date: SELF editor in chief Rachel Wilkerson Miller will be in conversation with Aubrey Gordon on Thursday, January 26 at 12 p.m. EST. Follow @selfmagazine for updates on how you can watch.