Recovery as an Act of Resistance
It can be difficult to find “whys” to ground your recovery in. For some people it might be a career, increased quality of life, or being able to be present with their loved ones. All of these are meaningful reasons to recover. While these motivations are relevant, the idea of eating as an act of resistance has been really helpful to me. This concept has been discussed in recovery spaces in recent years, though it was not coined by any specific theorist or clinician, it is an extension of concepts discussed by bell hooks, Sonya Renee Taylor, and Naomi Wolf. In my life, eating as an act of resistance means recognizing that nourishing myself and refusing to shrink my body is a small rebellion against larger social pressures. It means using tools like opposite action to align with my core values of autonomy and community to advocate for myself and others. When the world feels out of control, as it often does, I can eat my meals regardless; because taking up space in my life, in itself, is a form of rebellion.
Naomi Wolf touches on the effects of the collective social objective of becoming thinner through dieting in her book “The Beauty Myth”. Wolf explains, “Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one” (Wolf, 2002). When we restrict, we become far easier to control or manipulate. Patriarchy, capitalism, and fascism all operate through the oppression of women, particularly BIPOC and otherwise disenfranchised women. They sell diets, exercise plans, and endless self-improvement fixes that draw our attention away from our dwindling freedoms.
Big businesses and politicians capitalize on our need for control, which makes us sicker and easier to manipulate. Sonya Renee Taylor punctuates this in "The Body is Not An Apology”, she writes, “Racism, sexism, ableism, homo- and transphobia, ageism, fatphobia are algorithms created by humans’ struggle to make peace with the body. A radical self-love world is a world free from the systems of oppression that make it difficult and sometimes deadly to live in our bodies.” To recover is to break free from this perpetual self-injury and come into the light of advocacy and true freedom. In choosing life and non-disordered wellness we are standing up for what we believe in (Taylor, 2021). Ergo, being fully present and active in community requires eating enough– even when it feels wrong or conflicts with what feels safe.
By prioritizing eating a variety of foods in abundance, resisting urges to restrict, and decentering the moralization of food and body size, we can begin on the journey towards recovery and social change. Celine Leboeuf explains in her article, “Eating and the Politics of Self Care”, that recovery is inherently political and that she believes that healing is not only an individual choice, but one that reignites community and sparks political advocacy (Leboeuf, 2025). In that sense, recovery becomes more than personal healing; it is a refusal to participate in the self-erasure that diet culture demands. It also must be recognized that access to treatment and supportive care is itself political, shaped by systems of inequality that determine who is able to recover and who is left without adequate support. Choosing nourishment, rest, and care can be understood as reclaiming agency in a culture that often rewards women for taking up less space.
This 40,000 foot view of recovery being a political act requires a macro lens, and in many ways recovery truly is bigger than one person. With this understanding, eating as an act of resistance can also be applied to the microcosm of our daily life. Drawing from bell hooks’ belief that care and love can themselves be radical acts, recovery on the small scale can look like choosing nourishment in private moments when no one is watching and no praise is guaranteed (hooks, 2000). In that sense, practicing opposite action by eating despite fear and resisting urges to punish the body becomes a quiet refusal to participate in the culture of self-denial that teaches women they must disappear to deserve belonging.
Ultimately, recovery asks us to believe that our bodies are worthy of care even before we fully feel convinced of it. In a culture that profits from our internalized doubt and rewards our passivity, choosing to nourish ourselves becomes an act of defiance as much as an act of survival. Every meal eaten, every urge resisted through opposite action, every moment spent caring for ourselves and our loved ones, pushes back against the systems that depend on our exhaustion. Though my own recovery is still certainly a work in progress, this conceptualization gives me hope and something bigger to abide in. If recovery is both personal and political, then we owe it not only to ourselves but to one another to keep fighting for a world in which all people are allowed to exist fully, visibly, and without apology.
If you would like to learn more, I highly recommend looking at the works cited, as well as “Dead Weight” by Emmeline Cline and “Body Respect” by Lindo Bacon.
Works Cited
The Beauty Myth
Wolf, N. (2002). The beauty myth: How images of beauty are used against women (1st Harper Perennial ed.). Harper Perennial.
The Body Is Not an Apology
Taylor, S. R. (2021). The body is not an apology: The power of radical self-love (2nd ed.). Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
bell hooks
hooks, b. (2000). All about love: New visions. William Morrow.
Leboeuf, C. (2026). Eating and the politics of self-care: Resisting the tyranny of slenderness, fatphobia, and diet culture one forkful at a time. Hypatia, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1017/hyp.2026.10066
