Virginia Sole-Smith

this is so radical (while not actually saying anything that shouldn't be mainstream) that i'm going to have to read it over and over again before the ideas fully sink in. i'm far too steeped in anti-fat bias and the culture of thinness = good to be able to just read this once.

i wish it didn't have "parenting" in the title because the ways she's talking about advocating for children are just as important (and lacking) with adults, and even though it's always better to start fighting bias as children, most of us have this bias, and so could benefit from this book. not just parents. most of it isn't parent-specific and what i take from this book (at this point, on this reading) is just as important for myself and how i view the world as it is for what i'm teaching my kid.

this is so important, so vital, and sadly so radical and i will read it again and again until these lessons are more ingrained.

"...in 2021 a British case made international headlines when a judge ordered two teenagers into foster care because their parents had failed to wear their Fitbits and go to Weight Watchers meetings."

"We want our kids to love their bodies but we also continue to take it for granted that fat kids can't do that. A child's high body weight is still a problem to solve, a barrier to their ability to be a happy, healthy child. This thinking is the result of a nearly forty year old public heath crusade against the rising tide of children't weight. We've been told by our families, our doctors, and voices of authority including First Lady Michelle Obama, that raising a child at a so-called healthy body weight is an essential part of being a good parent."

"The real danger to a child in a larger body is how we treat them for having that body."… (más)

Our society is absolutely oozing with fatphobia. Everyone takes for granted that being fat is exactly the same as being unhealthy, that taking up less space is better, that eating less is virtuous, and that dieting and weight loss are desirable and achievable. It’s drilled into us as soon as we’re conscious, from the media and our parents and our doctors. Even if we, as adults, realize how awful all of this has been to us, and put in the work that it takes to unlearn, how do we fix this cycle?

The first third of this book breaks down all of the things that are assumed to be true when it comes to kids (and other humans) and fat. No, being fat is not unhealthy. Healthy kids come in all shapes and sizes, and so do unhealthy kids. “Lose weight” is not a valid medical treatment or advice, since 1) it does not improve health and 2) there is no universally or consistently effective method for weight loss, and the vast majority of weight loss attempts fail, so telling someone to lose weight is only marginally more realistic than telling them to grow a second head. A lot of adults understand these things on some level, or at least have experience dealing with them, but that’s not true for kids. Kids can pick up on fatphobic comments but don’t know how to deal with them, which teaches kids that they can’t trust their own bodies, which turns into eating disorders that can cause life-long physical and mental health problems. Particularly notable is that while food restriction in thin kids is a concerning eating disorder, the same food restriction in fat kids is encouraged as “dieting” despite resulting in the exact same health problems.

The middle section of this book is very intimate discussions with families about their struggles with unlearning internalized fatphobia and the aftermath of disordered eating in their families. I really applaud these families for their candor, especially the ones that are so open about things they have done wrong (e.g. literally locking up food in the parents’ bedroom to try to keep kids from binge eating). Families provide examples of different ways to approach a healthy relationship with food for kids, and the up-sides and down-sides of each.

The final third gets into more specific topics relating to kids and fatphobia and eating disorders, such as youth sports, puberty, and social media. At the end is the section I cherished the most - how to have conversations about bodies and fatphobia with various people, from co-parents to grandparents to thin kids and fat kids.

I cannot overstate how cathartic reading this book felt. A lot of the individual bits and pieces I had absorbed elsewhere but to see them all laid out plainly with backing evidence is really validating. I feel more prepared now to deal with my own internalized biases and to support the children in my life.

At the end is a list of suggested media, mostly books, which I have made into a list here: https://www.librarything.com/list/44921/all/Featured-in-Fat-Talk-by-Virginia-Sol...… (más)

I came into this book with high hopes of a book that would help root out why, as a feminist, as somebody who's read a lot about HAES, and as somebody who honestly is not even fat, I'm still insecure about my body size and what I eat. Why do so many people (especially women) have so much anxiety about what we put on our fork? How can we go back to the days of carefree eating of our youth (if there even were such days)?

When the author started spending a lot of time talking about getting children to eat, I thought "this must be the time where the author starts talking about those carefree youthful eating days!" but it turned out to be a lot of discussion about parents who have a hard time feeding children for whatever reason (medical trauma, pickiness) and there were a lot of stories but never really anything that created a thesis or brought all of the narratives together. I wanted to know: okay, when does the picky eating start? Why? Does it relate to our anxieties as we get older? But the focus on a few extreme individual cases means that the stories remained disconnected and weren't generalized to the experience of everyday folks.

Discussion of eating in adults similarly centered around extreme behavior. Picky eating that could be borderline eating disorders. And again, while there was a look into why these individual cases of picky eating occurred, there was no look into the insecurities of human adults eating in general. So I don't think this is a book about everyday people struggling with anxiety about putting food in their mouths. It's a look at the most extreme ends of the scale, without trying to bridge the gap at all.

My biggest issue with this book was how the author attempted to give information in an unbiased way (nominally a good idea), but which meant she wound up ignoring one side of many arguments. In discussing weight loss she glosses over how the diet industry is a multi-billion dollar industry, there is no scientific evidence that weight loss is even POSSIBLE, much less necessary for health. But she continues to discuss how people want to lose weight and it's possible for some (like, less than 15% of people who diet, according to one study) so we must all want to lose weight, right? Which winds up feeding (ha! I made a pun!) into that anxiety that I wanted help combating. If, at the end of the day, we hold up a 120 pound, 5'5" woman as the ideal, then no wonder people have completely messed up relationships with food. Like, that idea wasn't pushed back against *at all* in this book, which I thought was a totally missed opportunity. The author gives an entire chapter to discussing stomach amputation and has one sentence about how most of the people who go through the procedure wind up gaining all that weight back anyway. And I was glad she provided a single quote that I've read before, along the lines of how an intervention that is prescribed for fat people is the same thing that's considered disordered eating in skinny people. But she never uncritically thinks about that sentence! How messed up is it that we are encouraging anorexia in people just because of their body size? And there is no evidence that the outcome of what is encouraged in fat people will lead to an objectively better existence (positive health outcomes, regardless of the body size). You can't just say "both sides have good points 🤷🏻‍♀️" when one side is arguing for the unscientific elimination of fat bodies.

Also, and I hate to be the annoying vegan, but I really hate it when people say that veganism is a "diet." Sure, for some people, veganism is a diet much the way gluten-free has become one as well. But for others, it is a way of life. It is how some people honor our bodies, animals rights not to be eaten, and our environment (not to mention public health: COVID-19 never would have happened if people didn't eat meat). So to be labeled as some kind of "fringe movement" along with other healthy eating in general, I found to be disingenuous. Even though I have a lot of issues with the healthy food movement in general (fatphobia, racism), there's a good reason that the alternative food movement started. There was no critical look into the food industry in this book, other than a couple sentences about food advertising to communities of color. To throw the baby out with the bathwater is doing a disservice to the benefits we have gotten from food activists. It's important that people have advocated for getting things that are now as routine as labels on food. To just say that everyone who eats kale is a crunchy, Gweneth Paltrow clone, is rather insulting. That kind of attitude permeated from these pages, which again, I found to be ironic about a book nominally about how people have really screwed up relationships with food.

In short, I probably would not recommend this book to anyone. I don't know what the thesis was, so you're probably not going to feel any type of resolution from this book. Maybe read it if you're interested in reading about the most extreme cases of food pickiness in children and adults, and if you're not triggered by very graphic descriptions of medical interventions.… (más)