This book sheds new light on the political battle to define and construct obesity as a policy issue. Through a rich analysis of the debates in Australia and the UK, it develops a nuanced analysis of the competing narratives that actors rely on to make sense of and argue about this issue, and documents how and to what effect they draw on scientific evidence to support their accounts. The real 'war on obesity', it demonstrates, has always been over the meaning and nature of this public health crisis. This insightful work will interest scholars of interpretive policy studies, critical public health and science and technology studies.
Once dismissed by the medical profession as a purely cosmetic problem, obesity now ranks second only to smoking as a wholly preventable cause of death. Indeed, it's implicated in 300,000 deaths each year and is a major contributor to heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and depression. Even conservative estimates show that 15% of all children are now considered to be overweight-worldwide there are 22 million kids under five years old that are defined as fat. Supersized portions, unhealthy diets, and too little physical activity certainly contribute to what's making kids 'fat.' But that's not the whole story. Researchers are at a loss to explain why obesity rates have risen so suddenly and so steeply in the closing decades of the 20th century. But head out to the beaches, playgrounds, and amusement parks, and it's obvious that overweight children are more numerous and conspicuous. We see it in our neighborhoods and we read it in the headlines. Our nation-indeed the world-is in crisis. But knowledge is power and it's time to arm ourselves in the battle to win the war on obesity. Fed Up! is just what the doctor ordered. Based in part on the Institute of Medicine's ground-breaking report on childhood obesity, this new book from family physician and journalist Susan Okie provides in-depth background on the issue; shares heartrending but instructive case studies that illustrate just how serious and widespread the problem is; and gives honest, authoritative, science-based advice that constitute our best weapons in this critical battle.
A four year old Mexican American girl is taken away from her parents because she is obese and experiencing health problems related to her weight. Such a measure, once seen as extreme, quickly comes to be seen as a logical means of addressing a problem viewed as nothing short of child abuse. And yet, for all the purported concern for these children’s welfare, little if any mention is ever made of the psychological ramifications of removing children from their families. They are simply the latest victims of the war on obesity—a war declared on a “disease” but conducted, April Herndon contends in this book, along cultural lines. Fat Blame is a book about how the war on obesity is, in many ways, shaping up to be a battle against women and children, especially women and children who are marginalized via class and race. While conceding that fatness can be linked to certain conditions, or that some populations might be heavier than others, Herndon is more interested in the ways women and children are blamed for obesity and the ways interventions aimed at preventing obesity are problematic in and of themselves. From bariatric surgeries being performed on children to women being positioned as responsible for carrying to term a generation of thin children, her book looks closely at the stories of real people whose lives are drastically altered by interventions that are supposedly for their own good. As with so many practices surrounding bodies and health, like dieting, people are often simultaneously blamed and empowered through policies and interventions, especially those that seem to offer them choices. What Herndon reveals is how such choices only offer the illusion of being empowering. Rather, she shows how woman and children are pushed, pulled, and sometimes victimized by interventions such as bariatric surgeries, limits on reproductive technologies, and having their families broken up by the courts. Only by identifying members of this group as victims of discrimination, she argues, can we hope to return them to a fuller and richer kind of agency. In declaring a war on obesity, the United States has said that fat is one of the most serious enemies it faces. Fat Blame asks us to confront the real enemy—the moral, political, and ideological significance of our every move in this “war.”
The diet and weight-loss industry is worth $66 billion – billion!! The estimated annual health care costs of obesity-related illness are 190 billion or nearly 21% of annual medical spending in the United States. But how did we get here? Is this a battle we can’t win? What changes need to be made in order to scale back the incidence of obesity in the US, and, indeed, around the world? Here, Jonathan Engel reviews the sources of the problem and offers the science behind our modern propensity toward obesity. He offers a plan for helping address the problem, but admits that it is, indeed, an uphill battle. Nevertheless, given the magnitude of the costs in years of life and vigor lost, it is a battle worth fighting. Fat Nation is a social history of obesity in the United States since the second World War. In confronting this familiar topic from a historical perspective, Jonathan Engel attempts to show that obesity is a symptom of complex changes that have transpired over the past half century to our food, our living habits, our life patterns, our built environments, and our social interactions. He offers readers solid grounding in the known science underlying obesity (genetic set points, complex endocrine feedback loops, neurochemical messengering) but then makes the novel argument that obesity is a result of the interaction of our genes with our environment. That is, our bodies have always been programmed to become obese, but until recently never had the opportunity to do so. Now, with cheap calories ubiquitous (particularly in the form of sucrose), unwalkable physical spaces, deteriorating rituals and norms surrounding eating, and the withering of cooking skills, nearly every American daily confronts the challenge of not putting on weight. Given the outcomes, though, for those who are obese, Engel encourages us to address the problems and offers suggestions to help remedy the problem.
Are you tired of being stigmatized for your weight? Do you feel like the world is against you in your struggle with obesity? Are you ready to challenge the societal norms and redefine what it means to be healthy? Then this book is for you. - Discover the origins of fat phobia and how it has shaped our society. - Understand the science behind obesity, including genetic and environmental factors. - Examine the role of media and society in perpetuating the stigma around obesity. - Explore the real health implications of obesity, without the moral panic. - Dive into the psychological impact of fat phobia on individuals and society. - Uncover the truth about the weight loss industry and its profiteering. - Learn about the influence of feminism on body image and its implications. - Stand up against obesity-based discrimination and its legal ramifications. - Evaluate the government's role in addressing obesity and its policies. - Discover the fat acceptance movement and its fight for body positivity. - Explore the pressure and expectations on men's self-perception and body image. If you want to redefine health, body image, and masculinity in a world obsessed with body image, then buy this book today.
**The 2022 Lammy Award Winner in Transgender Nonfiction** Exploring the intersections of Blackness, gender, fatness, health, and the violence of policing. To live in a body both fat and Black is to exist at the margins of a society that creates the conditions for anti-fatness as anti-Blackness. Hyper-policed by state and society, passed over for housing and jobs, and derided and misdiagnosed by medical professionals, fat Black people in the United States are subject to sociopolitically sanctioned discrimination, abuse, condescension, and trauma. Da’Shaun Harrison--a fat, Black, disabled, and nonbinary trans writer--offers an incisive, fresh, and precise exploration of anti-fatness as anti-Blackness, foregrounding the state-sanctioned murders of fat Black men and trans and nonbinary masculine people in historical analysis. Policing, disenfranchisement, and invisibilizing of fat Black men and trans and nonbinary masculine people are pervasive, insidious ways that anti-fat anti-Blackness shows up in everyday life. Fat people can be legally fired in 49 states for being fat; they’re more likely to be houseless. Fat people die at higher rates from misdiagnosis or nontreatment; fat women are more likely to be sexually assaulted. And at the intersections of fatness, Blackness, disability, and gender, these abuses are exacerbated. Taking on desirability politics, the limitations of gender, the connection between anti-fatness and carcerality, and the incongruity of “health” and “healthiness” for the Black fat, Harrison viscerally and vividly illustrates the myriad harms of anti-fat anti-Blackness. They offer strategies for dismantling denial, unlearning the cultural programming that tells us “fat is bad,” and destroying the world as we know it, so the Black fat can inhabit a place not built on their subjugation.
In recent decades, America has been waging a veritable war on fat in which not just public health authorities, but every sector of society is engaged in constant "fat talk" aimed at educating, badgering, and ridiculing heavy people into shedding pounds. We hear a great deal about the dangers of fatness to the nation, but little about the dangers of today’s epidemic of fat talk to individuals and society at large. The human trauma caused by the war on fat is disturbing—and it is virtually unknown. How do those who do not fit the "ideal" body type feel being the object of abuse, discrimination, and even revulsion? How do people feel being told they are a burden on the healthcare system for having a BMI outside what is deemed—with little solid scientific evidence—"healthy"? How do young people, already prone to self-doubt about their bodies, withstand the daily assault on their body type and sense of self-worth? In Fat-Talk Nation, Susan Greenhalgh tells the story of today’s fight against excess pounds by giving young people, the campaign’s main target, an opportunity to speak about experiences that have long lain hidden in silence and shame.Featuring forty-five autobiographical narratives of personal struggles with diet, weight, "bad BMIs," and eating disorders, Fat-Talk Nation shows how the war on fat has produced a generation of young people who are obsessed with their bodies and whose most fundamental sense of self comes from their size. It reveals that regardless of their weight, many people feel miserable about their bodies, and almost no one is able to lose weight and keep it off. Greenhalgh argues that attempts to rescue America from obesity-induced national decline are damaging the bodily and emotional health of young people and disrupting families and intimate relationships.Fatness today is not primarily about health, Greenhalgh asserts; more fundamentally, it is about morality and political inclusion/exclusion or citizenship. To unpack the complexity of fat politics today, Greenhalgh introduces a cluster of terms—biocitizen, biomyth, biopedagogy, bioabuse, biocop, and fat personhood—and shows how they work together to produce such deep investments in the attainment of the thin, fit body. These concepts, which constitute a theory of the workings of our biocitizenship culture, offer powerful tools for understanding how obesity has come to remake who we are as a nation, and how we might work to reverse course for the next generation.
Is obesity really a public health problem and what does the construction of obesity as a health problem mean for men? According to official statistics, the majority of men in nations such as England and the USA are overweight or obese. Public health officials, researchers, governments and various agencies are alarmed and have issued dire warnings about a global ‘obesity epidemic’. This perceived threat to public health seemingly legitimates declarations of war against what one US Surgeon General called ‘the terror within’. Yet, little is known about weight-related issues among everyday men in this context of symbolic or communicated violence. Men and the War on Obesity is an original, timely and controversial study. Using observations from a mixed-sex slimming club, interviews with men whom medicine might label overweight or obese and other sources, this study urges a rethink of weight or fat as a public health issue and sometimes private trouble. Recognizing the sociological wisdom that things are not as they seem, it challenges obesity warmongering and the many battles it mandates or incites. This important book could therefore help to change current thinking and practices not only in relation to men but also women and children who are defined as overweight, obese or too fat. It will be of interest to students and researchers of gender and the body within sociology, gender studies and cultural studies as well as public health researchers, policymakers and practitioners.
What's Wrong with Fat? examines the social implications of understanding fatness as a medical health risk, disease, and epidemic. Examining the ways in which debates over fatness have developed, Abigail Saguy argues that the obesity crisis literally makes us fat, intensifies negative body image, and justifies weight-based discrimination.
An exploration of America's self-defeating war on obesity argues against the myth that falsely equates thinness with health and explains why dieting is bad for the health and how the media misinform the public.
