Quick Take
- Narration: LaNecia Edmonds delivers Kinsey’s text with warmth and clarity, bringing the right combination of authority and approachability to material that requires both.
- Themes: Intersectional wellness, intuitive eating for BIPOC and LGBTQ+ individuals, liberation and body acceptance
- Mood: Direct and affirming, with the register of a trusted practitioner speaking to people who have not previously felt spoken to
- Verdict: An overdue intervention in the body-positivity space that takes intersectionality seriously rather than using it as framing, most powerful for the specific community it addresses directly.
I had a conversation a few years ago with a colleague who works in community health in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Chicago. She described her frustration with the body-positivity content she had been trying to use with clients: it kept centering thin, white, cisgender bodies as the aspirational departure point from which everyone else was supposed to find liberation. The framework was designed for a specific starting point, and her clients were not starting there. Decolonizing Wellness is the book she needed, and it arrived too late for many of the people who could have used it first.
Dalia Kinsey is a registered dietitian and nutritionist whose practice sits at the intersection of nutrition science, body acceptance, and liberation-focused wellness. The book’s central argument is that mainstream body-positivity and intuitive eating movements, despite their stated commitments to inclusion, have reproduced many of the same cisgender, heteronormative, and Eurocentric standards they claim to critique. For queer people of color, the frameworks most available in wellness culture are not neutral. They carry embedded assumptions about whose body is the reference point and whose deviations require explanation.
The Specific Failures of Mainstream Body Positivity
Kinsey is specific about where she sees the failure. Anti-Blackness and colorism operate within body-image culture in ways that most body-positivity content does not address. The intersectional challenges of homophobia and transphobia shape how queer people of color experience food and eating in ways that a framework designed primarily for straight women navigating fatphobia cannot adequately address. Generational trauma has particular implications for communities of color’s relationships with both food scarcity and food abundance.
A reviewer named Linda Herzer, who identifies as a white cisgender woman, describes finding unexpected resonance with Kinsey’s framework despite not being the primary audience, specifically around recognizing how deeply internalized cultural standards operate. That kind of cross-audience reach is a sign that Kinsey is not simply describing a problem but developing tools that travel. The journal prompts and affirmations included in the book are practical enough to serve listeners regardless of their specific intersectional position, though they are most precisely targeted at queer people of color.
Intuitive Eating as Reclaimed Practice
The food-freedom framework Kinsey builds draws on the intuitive eating tradition while contextualizing it within liberation politics in a way the original Tribole and Resch framework does not fully do. Eating according to internal cues rather than external rules is not merely a behavioral prescription for Kinsey; it is an act of reclaiming bodily autonomy that has particular meaning for people whose bodies have been subject to institutional and cultural control in specific historical ways. The distinction matters because it gives the reader a reason to take intuitive eating seriously that is not purely self-care rhetoric.
Reviewer Connie draws the comparison to The Maintenance Phase podcast, which is an apt reference point. Listeners who find that podcast’s commitment to examining wellness industry harms through an evidence-and-equity lens compelling will find Decolonizing Wellness a natural companion, going deeper into the practice side where the podcast tends to stay in the critique register.
The Format and LaNecia Edmonds’s Contribution
At just over four hours, this is a compact but dense listen. Edmonds narrates with a warmth that serves the material’s therapeutic aspirations without softening its political edge. The journal prompts and affirmations land differently when spoken aloud than when read on a page, and Edmonds calibrates her delivery to let those sections breathe. Reviewer Valeria, who identifies as queer and BIPOC, describes Kinsey as having put into words what she had been feeling for years in the wellness space, which is the highest thing you can say about a book of this kind.
Audience and Scope
This book is most precisely for its stated audience: queer people of color who have found mainstream wellness culture failing them in specific and describable ways. Practitioners, coaches, and clinicians working with that community will also find it essential. Listeners outside those categories should approach it as education rather than direct address, and the book is worth that reading too. Kinsey is not exclusionary; she is targeted, and that targeting is the point.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Decolonizing Wellness primarily for queer people of color, or does it have broader relevance?
Kinsey explicitly addresses queer BIPOC as her primary audience, and the most specific tools are calibrated for that community. However, white and cisgender readers have found genuine value in the framework for understanding how cultural standards operate on their own bodies and in their professional practice.
Does the audiobook format work for the journal prompts and mindfulness tools Kinsey includes?
Yes. LaNecia Edmonds narrates the interactive elements with appropriate pacing, giving them space to land rather than reading through them at normal audiobook speed. Having a notebook available for the journal prompts enhances the experience considerably.
How does this compare to Christy Harrison’s Anti-Diet or the intuitive eating canon?
Decolonizing Wellness draws on intuitive eating principles but contextualizes them within liberation politics and intersectional experience in ways those texts do not. If Anti-Diet is the entry point for understanding diet culture’s harms, Decolonizing Wellness extends the analysis specifically for communities whose experiences of those harms are shaped by race, sexuality, and gender identity.
Is there scientific evidence behind Kinsey’s recommendations, or is this primarily political and philosophical?
Both strands are present. Kinsey is a registered dietitian and grounds her practical recommendations in nutrition science while situating them within a political framework. The combination is deliberate: she is arguing that evidence-based nutrition and liberation politics are not in tension but mutually reinforcing.
