It’s Always Been Ours: Rewriting the Story of Black Women’s Bodies by Jessica Wilson, MS, RD, was published February 7th, 2023. I was sent an ARC as a result of my insistence on reading books about fat activism. I informed the publicist that I am a white, mostly able-bodied, straight woman and that regretfully, at this time, I don’t know any Black women actively reviewing books. My school schedule prevents me from seeking out more bloggers to develop relationships with. Nonetheless, the publicist sent an ARC knowing my schema is different from the author’s. I say all that to quote Wilson: “This book is specifically for Black women.” My hope is to boost Wilson’s work and get it into the hands of her intended readers.
Wilson, who reminds readers that a nutritionist can be anyone who wants to all themselves one, is a dietitian, who must be trained and licensed. She examines the information Black women are getting about bodies and food. While Health at Every Size and Eating Intuitively seem more “natural,” Wilson argues the information isn’t straightforward, nor is it anti-diet. Furthermore, food advice applies to a narrow category of people, namely white women. Food associated with non-white cultures are demonized: the east Asian staple rice, everything Mexican, everything associated with Black culture, etc. It’s Always Been Ours is different than what I expected because it responds to current works about food and bodies rather than lecturing with statistics, and it’s also deeply personal.
Wilson begins with her own clients and notices a pattern of problems not addressed in the larger professional field. When she worked in eating disorders as a dietitian, she encountered two Queer women, one Mexican and one Indigenous, neither of whom were “underweight,” though both restricted their eating and had all the physiological evidence of the effects of starvation. However, when Wilson and her coworker attended a conference about eating disorders and asked about clients who are both starving and “normal” or “overweight,” they were dismissed. The speaker said, “I don’t know what is happening with your patients, but I am talking about girls who are actually sick” — meaning white women who “looked like” they were starving. From my own reading, I know it is not uncommon for fat women to pretend they’ve eaten more food than is true to hide eating disorders.
And yet Wilson isn’t talking about eating disorders. She’s looking at a history and system that leads Black women into her office asking for nutrition advice on how to be smaller so they are respected by their white colleagues (and one woman noticed she felt better when white men acknowledged her when she lost all curves through food restriction). Typically, Wilson’s advice is to eat more food and acknowledge the survival skills Black women develop when it comes to eating. Surprisingly, it was at Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop conference, a three-day celebration of the guru’s woo-woo care that felt less oppressed than a health expo at which people working in the field of nutrition gave advice on losing weight to avoid future illness without exploring cultural and systemic reasons why bodies don’t behave the same way across the board. The experiences extend across a couple of chapters. The personal examples stand out because they are unique anecdotes.
The other surprise for me is Wilson having a dialogue with other, readily-available books about diet and culture. Christy Harrison is a white woman people finally listened to, despite Black dietitians noting the problems Harrison is now famous for spotlighting. Another popular author is Body Positive Jes Baker, a young white woman claiming you can just decide to not care about how people perceive you in what comes off as a “Live! Laugh! Love!” moment, ignoring the survival component of Black women’s attempts to lose weight. I’ve tried Baker’s books and can’t stand the “just use your middle finger and dismantle the patriarchy!” nonsense. Her attitude reminds me of my students who used to write “should” essays: “women should be paid the same as men,” “racism should be over,” “anyone 18+ should be allowed alcohol.” You can say “should” all you want, but obviously the reality is different. As Wilson responds to contemporary books about food/diet, she educates readers on where Black women are let down and left out because the conversation is so narrow.
Wilson’s thoughts on Intuitive Eating, which sounds like a no-brainer food attitude, gave me a new perspective from people of socioeconomic status. If food is only available at certain times, such as the free public school lunch or for fifteen minutes between part-time jobs that don’t offer a lunch break, then people have to eat during those critical times, whether hungry or not. They may eat a lot to make up for hours of hunger. Or, she notes, many students do not accept free lunches from school to avoid the shame of other students knowing.
Jessica Wilson’s book is one to read now. Not only does it reframe the reader’s experiences with food and bodies, but she explores popular figures like Nicole Byer and Lizzo while cross-examining the narrow place where white women may find joy with their bodies through HAES and Intuitive Eating, or sympathy when they restrict their eating into starvation, but Black women and women of color are excluded.
books i’ve read discussed in it’s always been ours:
- Sonya Renee Taylor’s The Body is Not an Apology
- Nicole Byer’s #VERYFAT #VERYBRAVE
- Christy Harrison’s Anti-Diet
- Shayda Kafai’s Crip Kinship explains the work of Sins Invalid, a group Wilson discusses/adores
disclaimer
Thanks to publicist Nanda Dyssou for sending me an ARC from Hachette Go for review. This has not affected my opinions. You can order a hardcover copy, e-book, or unabridged audiobook.
Grab the Lapels 
I’ve been waiting for someone to push back on the “intuitive eating” advice for people–and there are lots of them–who can only eat during scheduled breaks and who may not have been able to make time for shopping and packing food.
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I never even thought about how we can’t eat when we’re hungry, despite always working jobs that make it hard to eat when I’m hungry. I think that says something about my relationship to food. I’ve very much been trained to eat at set times, even when it doesn’t make sense.
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I’ve been trained to eat at set times too because of work. On weekends and vacations I eat so differently at different times of the day than I am allowed to during the week. It used to really bother me that I wanted to eat lunch at 10:30 or 11 a.m. on the weekend, but that’s when I’m hungry! It’s taken a lot of self-talk to make it ok.
The book sounds great and not just for Black women, but for anyone interested in how racism and sexism impact the issues.
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I’m sitting here, and it’s 11:18AM. I’m at home, and I’m thinking, “Ugh, hurry up, lunch time!” Why don’t I just go eat the food?? For me, it’s fear that I’ll get hungry for dinner too early because I had lunch too early. And that’s a bunch of nonsense. It also goes waaaay back to public school when I would have breakfast at 5:30 or 6:00AM and then lunch wasn’t until 12:30PM, but we weren’t allowed snacks or food between classes. What kind of torture nonsense is that that sees Cheerio’s as a 6-7 hour power meal??
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Right? I’m an early riser and I’m up by 5-ish even on weekends and eat breakfast when I get up and then wonder why I’m hungry for lunch so early. At work my lunch break is at noon and I have carrots for a morning snack. Then of course by the time James and I are both home, dinner is close to 6 so I snack on dried fruit and nuts in the afternoon. So one weekends I think I need to follow the same eating schedule as during the week. Eating schedule! It’s all so ridiculous. And we wonder why there is so much disordered eating in this country.
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Absolutely. And then there is disordered eating that comes from emotions. I’m currently listening to Love that Life by Jonathan Van Ness, and he’s talking about emotional eating from trauma he experienced as a kid.
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Stress eating! That was me in college! And also my mom who was always dieting, and both my parents who would make me eat everything on my dinner plate with no option to refuse anything being served. And then I met James who had the healthiest relationship to food of anyone I had ever known and he was a huge support in helping me find a healthy balance. I still struggle sometimes though. I suspect that will never go away completely.
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I do think men get the benefit of the doubt when it comes to food, so it might be easier for them to have a healthy relationship with food. That’s societal misogeny. They’re “growing boys” or “strapping young men” if they eat what suits their hunger.
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This sounds really interesting for people not the intended audience too Melanie. It’s horrifying to hear the cultural-specific assumptions and the refusal to listen to different experiences. How many people end up suffering do needlessly as a result of such blindness.
I love your “should” comment. I decided some time ago to try to avoid that word … I can’t think of many situations where it is good to use it.
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I think about the “should” state of mind a lot because I heard it for 11 years. Well, not all 11, because eventually I started pointing out how “should” means nothing and arguments should be specific, and, preferably, directly applicable to the student’s life.
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This sounds really interesting though. I hadn’t really thought about the privilege of being able to eat whenever you want, even though when I’m at work I often end up eating at odd times.
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My school was really controlling about not letting students eat between classes because oh, no, what if they get crumbs somewhere or leave a wrapper on the floor. Instead, we eat breakfast around 6AM and don’t get lunch until 12:30, and that bowl of cereal is long gone by then. Daily, I had the shakes before lunch time, which is only amusing because right before lunch I had orchestra.
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I remember school being similar but it seems more relaxed now, at least at my girls’ school. There are even snacks available for the kids in the classrooms and in the office. Turns out kids learn better when they’re properly fed!
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SO TRUE.
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I have the opposite problem of having to eat at set times. I sit next to my fridge 15 hours a day, and of course eat too much, even if it is mostly fruit. I usually eat lunch at 11.30 but that’s because I can’t wait any longer (anyway, I breakfast at 5.00 so that’s a long gap).
Speaking of should, so many articles recommend that you should be a certain weight for a given height, making no allowance not just for race, but for muscle mass and genetics and all sorts of stuff.
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It’s nice that you have a fridge and can control, to some extent, what you eat. For instance, I know you’re vegetarian, so you can make that happen, even on the road. You say you eat too much, but is that a judgment of yourself, or are you hungry and eating food? That’s some of the conversation Wilson has. One of her clients would eat a whole pizza every night and wanted to go to therapy to learn about over eating. Then, as they talked, Wilson realized this person was a student who did not have time to eat all day because she had two jobs, so when she finally ate her first and only meal of the day, it was a pizza at 11PM.
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I’m glad this book is out there! Much needed perspective. Another book coming out soon from a Black woman in fitness/food is The Body Liberation Project by Chrissy King. You might be interested in it.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61322623-the-body-liberation-project?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=YW1ySPO3eE&rank=1
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Thank you for the recommendation, Laila. Actually, while I was reading Wilson’s book I was thinking about you, because I know you’ve mentioned several times Intuitive Eating, so I wonder what you would think of her argument.
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Oh I don’t strictly follow intuitive eating practices but absolutely think you should eat when you need to based on schedule even if not hungry. So yeah, the original authors of that book (Tribole and ? The other escapes me) were probably coming from a perspective of whiteness and middle-classness.
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We need more books like this! Very important stuff, and told with honesty (and earned / certified knowledge) that is all the more important. I had no idea about the dietitian/nutritionist distinction, thank you for mentioning that!
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I didn’t know it was different either. I went to a nutritionist once. By the end of our first meeting, she was showing me how to do planks. I just couldn’t believe what nonsense I was subjected to.
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Oh lord that sounds terrible. Good thing you never went back!
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Very interesting. There is so much information out there, but I never stopped to consider the differences in diet/nutrition for people of different races. I guess my brain was just like, “The same goes for all human bodies.”
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Same, though recently Nick and I had that conversation I told you about in regards to his body and how it’s currently functioning differently from mine. One thing I forgot to mention is that when someone loses weight too fast, it’s a huge strain on their vital organs, so that’s something his doctor is keeping an eye on.
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I’ve heard about the strain on the organs, but I’ve never known of anyone who was actively being monitored for it. Nick must have a good doc.
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I think so, too. I mean, it hasn’t been two years, and it’s 50 lbs. He said his doctor is younger, too, so I’m hoping he’s up-to-date on all the latest ways of approaching patients. I left a comment for another reader, who is a nurse in England, about my concerns regarding how medical staff and patients perceive each other.
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When I first started reading about intuitive eating, I was irritated at the assumption that everyone can control when they have breaks. I have (some) say over this now, though affected by teaching schedule, but at the time I was working 13-hour shifts and often didn’t get a break at all. Frequently I would get to the end of the shift without having had a glass of water, let alone a meal, and of course by that point I was completely ravenous!
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I wish more folks had mentioned somewhere, at some point, about their concerns regarding intuitive eating, but I guess unless there is a space to do so, or a conversation, there was no reason. Lou, I can’t imagine working 13 hours with no food or water. That sounds like a punishment. And you were expected to do your best during those 13 hours? Yeesh.
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Yes, it’s a big part of the reason I don’t work clinically any more! It wasn’t every shift and it was much worse on some wards than others – and I did get used to it, but of course that’s a problem in itself. It’s one of the things that I talk about with the students now when we’re covering patient safety and human factors (though it’s all much worse for them post-pandemic than it ever was for me, because of staffing issues). A cheery thought.
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[…] buddy Daniel in the Huntsville Horror group for recommending Junji Ito. Also, ever since I reviewed It’s Always Been Ours by Jessica Wilson, I’ve noticed more forthcoming or newly-published books on fatness by Black women, so […]
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