Best Books About Food and Faith

Whether you prefer to listen to audio books while on the go or if you’d rather curl up on the couch with a book and highlighter, these are some of my top picks for your reading list if you’re looking for the best books about food and faith.

These books will help you learn about intuitive eating, grow in your faith, improve your body image and encourage you on your journey to Follow Jesus Not Diets.

I’ve organized it by topic and linked out to my Amazon Affiliate page so you can order what catches your eye right away.

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. If you click through and make a purchase, I’ll earn a commission, at no additional cost to you. Read my full disclosure here.

Disclaimer: For the record, whenever I recommend a book or some other resource, I’m NOT saying I recommend every single word or idea in the book. I AM saying that I found something useful in it that spoke to me and helped me take a step forward on my journey. I believe that if I got something out of it, you might too.

Erin’s picks for Intuitive Eating books

Let’s start with the best books on food. Most of these books have nothing to do with Christian faith, but instead are the food and nutrition books that create the framework of Intuitive Eating. I find it helpful to understand the biology and health aspects first, before looking at it through a Biblical lens.

Intuitive Eating – (DISCLAIMER: SECULAR)

Intuitive Eating is the book that started it all! A must read!

I recommend the fully revised and updated 4th edition that just released in 2020 Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach.

Health at Every Size – (DISCLAIMER: SECULAR)

If the first and most important book to read on your intuitive eating journey is Intuitive Eating (see above), the close second is Health at Every Size by Linda Bacon, PhD.

This is essential reading for anyone who believes the lie that your health depends on your weight. This book does an excellent job of unpacking scientific studies and deconstructing weight myths in an easy to understand way.

If you don’t think you want to wade into the deep end of the science, you can also check out the book Body Respect (DISCLAIMER: SECULAR), which is a simplified version of the HAES science co-written by the same author. Body Respect is an easier read without all the study data.

The Intuitive Eating Workbook – (DISCLAIMER: SECULAR)

The Intuitive Eating Workbook: 10 Principles for Nourishing a Health Relationship with Food is a great supplement to the original.

The workbook has lots of hands-on activities, reflection questions, and tools to help you start working through and applying the principles taught in the original book to your own daily life.

Anti-Diet – (DISCLAIMER: SECULAR)

This is the 2019 book written by Christy Harrison the host of the Food Psych podcast (and how I discovered intuitive eating).

This book opens with a fascinating history of Diet Culture (aka “The Life Thief” as she describes it) and an unpacking of the political, social and economic factors at play that will make your head spin!

If you read this book, you’re going to be pretty mad at diet culture. It’s great for that. Plus it gets you started with an overview of intuitive eating. But from there, you will want to circle back to one of the original Intuitive Eating books to teach you more about what to do on a practical level.

Grace Food and Everything In Between – Discover the transforming power of grace to set you free from food and body shame by Aubrey Golbek. This book unpacks many of the principles of intuitive eating from a Christian perspective.

A must read for Christian women who want to learn about intuitive eating.

Fulfilled: Let Go of Shame, Embrace Your Body, and Eat the Food you Love – The newest book on intuitive eating from a faith-based perspective is Fulfilled by Alexandra MacKillop and it just released 3/2/21. I had the privilege of reading an advance copy as part of the launch team and have been singing the praises of Fulfilled for the last few weeks online.

This book is such a blessing for the woman who wants to break free from the shame and frustration of dieting and truly understand how intuitive eating is God’s design for our health. Alexandra MacKillop skillfully explains the problems with dieting from a scientific and faith-based perspective and then shows us how to eat with freedom and embrace the bodies God created. If you want to learn intuitive eating from a faith-based perspective, this is a must read. I can’t recommend it highly enough!

Eat to Love – This book by Jenna Hollenstein explores Intuitive Eating from the Buddhist perspective, so obviously it’s not Christian.

But I got SO much out of reading this, not just for what it taught about intuitive eating but also for how it emphasizes spirituality as a part of health as well as the key component of mindfulness. Plus, it was so fun to learn about Buddhist philosophy, which I didn’t know much about previously.

Diet Detox – This 30 Day Devotional to Ditching Diets and Claiming Christ’s Love is a must read! This will encourage you and bring God’s healing and grace into your relationship with food and your body.

I love this intro note from the authors, it’s so promising: “Our hopes is that you’ll run from dieting and the need for six pack abs with full “ab-andon” and run into the arms of the One who made you and loves you just as you are.” Amen!

Erin’s picks for Body Image Books

Compared to Who? – This book simultaneously convicts you and empowers you. It cuts to the root issue of idolatry – a hard truth, but a necessary one.

Heather Creekmore explains it like no other and she speaks truth and grace over our body image struggles. A must-read for Christian women who wrestle with self worth and appearance.

*NOTE* Heather wrote this book years before becoming an intuitive eater so there are some lingering diet culture references in the book that I know she would write differently today. With those potential triggers noted, it is STILL a must-read for Christian body image.

The Burden of Better – I loved Heather’s first book “Compared to Who?” so I couldn’t wait to get my hands on her new book which dives deeper into those waters. The Burden of Better blessed me with a much deeper, more personal understanding of comparison and the heart issues behind it. It helped me to recognize how that was showing up in my own life, so God sent me this book in His perfect timing.

Her quote sums it up – “Comparison isn’t a result of low self-esteem; it’s a shallow understanding of grace.” There is so much power and life in her chapters on grace! This book invites us to lay down the burden of better and rest. That is so freeing! I don’t know a single woman who doesn’t need this message.

Breaking Free from Body Shame – Full review coming soon! Jess Connolly does a great job of giving us the modern rally cry for principle 1 of intuitive eating: reject the diet mentality. Your body is GOOD. Shame OFF you. FYI this book does not cover IE by name, but shares a lot of the ideas.

Fat and Faithful: Fat and Faithful: Learning to Love Our Bodies, Our Neighbors and Ourselves by J. Nicole Morgan is a must read for any woman seeking to heal her relationship with her body.

The author shares her journey from body shame to fat acceptance and provides needed insight on the issues of gluttony, size discrimination in the church, and what it means to be made in the image of God.

Lovely – Lovely: How I Learned to Embrace the Body God Gave Me by Amanda Martinez Beck is another is a must read for any woman seeking to heal her relationship with her body. I especially loved this book since it offers a Catholic perspective, with proof texts from scripture and the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Amanda shares some much needed truth on the purpose of bodies and what makes a body good. Her insights help us understand why we need to reframe the way we think and speak about bodies in this culture – our bodies and the bodies of others. Amanda also takes us beyond “body image” and speaks to the deeper spiritual issues present.

Love Beyond Looks – It seems like I have a lot of books waiting to be read on body image! This one I don’t need to read to recommend, because I know the author Kasey Shuler and I love her heart for this message. I trust her 5-week Bible Study on Body Image will be a blessing to you!

Erin’s picks for Faith Books

A CAVEAT for many of these faith books… Most of these books speak to health from a faith-based approach, however most of them have too much connection to diet culture and too much emphasis on weight loss for my taste.

That being said, the Biblical lessons in these books are still valuable outside of the diet context. If you are far enough along on your journey to be able to put on your critical-thinking hat and notice when the author is reading scripture through the lens of diet culture (rather than reading it it on its own terms), you’ll be strengthening your awareness, literacy and discernment. Then you can take what serves you and leave the rest.

To be clear – I don’t want you to diet. But if you’re going to diet, at least have God involved.

The Wellness Revelation – *SEE DIET CULTURE CAVEAT ABOVE*

The Wellness Revelation includes a key point in health and faith that is not discussed enough: body idolatry. The author Alissa Keeton is a fitness trainer and nutrition consultant who works individually with clients and offers fitness teacher training courses. She is firmly in the diet industry. So again, this is “dieting with God.”

But I don’t even mind so much, I got soo much good Biblical truth from this book! She is a gifted Bible teacher. I connected deeply with the author’s personal story and the book makes a compelling point that the whole point of health is so that we can love God and love others. I couldn’t agree more!

So, I think we take the diet culture underlying this message with a grain of salt and soak up the rest of the goodness in this book.

Move for Joy – Kasey’s approach connects our fitness journey with our identity in Christ in a refreshing and empowering way.

As far as I know this is the ONLY book that approaches the intuitive eating principle “Exercise – Feel the Difference” (aka joyful movement) from a faith-based perspective. It’s an intuitive training approach to pursue God in fitness and find happiness.

This book is more of a tool than a simple read. You use Kasey’s quiz to assess which type of exerciser you are and then take a deep dive into the motivators, struggles and strategies of that type so you can begin to heal your relationship with exercise and find joy in moving your body again.

Food Body and Love But the Greatest of These is Love – Dr. Kari Anderson is an aptly named “wounded healer” in the eating disorder treatment world. This book blends the most powerful parts of her personal experience with food/body and her professional experience treating those who struggle in a way that leaves the reader saying – this gal gets it, and now I get it too.

Dr. Anderson tackles difficult topics of trauma and the mind-body connection through story and simply explained science. I appreciated how she approached a complicated topic of polyvagal theory with her reader in mind. For women who struggle to understand what the heck is going on in their mind and body and why their relationship with food feels so chaotic and dramatic – this book is a revelation! I highly recommend it and can’t wait to host a book club to read it with other women struggling in their relationship with food. Thank you Dr. Anderson for creating this incredible resource!

More of the best books on food & faith

I will be adding more books to this list as I read them (or listen to them on Audible). If you subscribe to my email newsletter you’ll be in the loop on updates to the recommended reading list. For now, here are a few sitting on my bookshelf waiting their turn to be read or ***waiting for me to write the review ***:

I hope to one day write comprehensive review of each book recommended above. I have pages of notes in my journal from each of these and I think it would be so fun to revisit my notes and share my takeaways.

If you’ve read any of these books and would like to discuss it, email me or message me on social media! I LOVE learning and talking books with fellow readers.

You can also check out the reading list we’ve used for the Intuitive Eating for Christian Women MEMBERSHIP over in this post What We’ve Read in Book Club.

And if you have any books about food and faith that you think I would like, please let me know that too.

Happy reading friends!