We firmly believe that a body liberation approach makes for better public health. All bodies are deserving of liberation—autonomy, freedom, breaking the restrictive systems of oppression and discriminatory social conventions that limit and harm us. Public health is committed to unpacking and reducing the harms of white supremacy culture, and to moving toward a more equitable and just society that truly values the strength of our diversity.

We can take a significant step toward this anti-oppression aspiration by changing the way we think about and behave toward bodies of various sizes, including our own. As we all have bodies, the liberation of bodies impacts us all, and intersects with our other identities to create the complex beings that we are.

Within this website we will illustrate some of the ways in which public health can move toward a more liberatory and ethical approach to bodies (O’Hara & Gregg, 2012; Pause’, 2017), embracing our various sizes, shapes and abilities. There are materials covering the issues of weight bias, discrimination and stigma that permeate our field and our society, from the perspective of research and academia to personal narratives. These are foundational for awareness and understanding about what we want to change. And, there are many resources about how we can “do public health” differently (Hunger et al., 2020), building on the decades of work that has already been done by fat and body liberationists before us (Bonner, 2022).