Summary of Fat Talk by Virginia Sole-Smith: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture E-Book

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• Herausgeber: BookRix
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

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Summary of Fat Talk by Virginia Sole-Smith: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture

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Virginia Sole-Smith's book Fat Talk exposes the daily onslaught of fatphobia and body shaming that kids face from school, sports, doctors, diet culture, and parents. It offers strategies for how families can change the conversation around weight, health, and self-worth. It also offers a new approach for thinking about food and bodies, and a way for us to work towards a more weight-inclusive world.

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Summary of Fat Talk by Virginia Sole-Smith: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture

Virginia Sole-Smith's book Fat Talk offers strategies to change the conversation around weight, health, and self-worth.BookRix GmbH & Co. KG81371 Munich

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Summary of Fat Talk

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Summary of Virginia Sole-Smith’s book

Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture

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Summary of Fat Talk by Virginia Sole-Smith: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture

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This is an unofficial summary & analysis of Virginia Sole-Smith’s “Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture” designed to enrich your reading experience.

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PART 1 : Fat Talk: An Initiation

When the narrator's daughters were five and two, they ran into Barbara, an old family friend who had not seen them since they were much tinier. Barbara complimented Violet's long ballerina legs and Beatrix's short and rounder legs. The narrator wondered how much the comment had sunk in, as studies have shown that kids as young as three associate fat bodies with negative traits. The narrator was a thin kid once, but her body changed in the late '90s, when Britney Spears's exposed torso, Delia's catalog, Kate Moss's heroin chic, and halter crop tops and low-rise jeans were popular. Our culture, dominated by whiteness and patriarchy, slices bodies apart into discrete, idealized shapes.

We are taught to equate our worth with our body size, ignoring how we know that body size is mercurial. Complimenting a thin child reinforces the idea that thin bodies are better than fat bodies. We want our children to love their bodies, but we also want them to be thin. Unlearning this core belief about the importance of thinness means deciding that both thin and fat bodies have equal value. This requires challenging traditional beliefs about health, b eauty, and morality.

THE WRONG EPIDEMIC

Anti-fat bias is the hatred of fatness that results in the stigmatization of fat people in almost every realm of society. Research shows that four out of five Americans hold some level of anti-fat bias and that our implicit dislike of fatness is increasing. Activists use the terms "fatphobia" and "anti-fatness" interchangeably, with a slight preference for "anti-fat bias" because it is often a manufactured anxiety taught to us by biased institutions and systems. Parents experience their fatphobia as a kind of terror, though, because antifatness goes well beyond an aesthetic bias. The belief system that thin is better than fat has been rooted in decades of public health policies, diet culture messaging, food advertising, and other forms of public discourse.

This bias is a chicken-and-egg-style conundrum, as there is no concrete data showing that a high body weight causes health problems like diabetes, heart disease, and asthma. However, there is a chicken-and-egg-style conundrum in how we parent our children, as weight has become a measure of their current and future health and happiness, as well as our own success or failure as parents. There is a further push-pull of anxieties around our children's weight right now. The message of body positivity originated with second-wave feminism and early fat rights activism, but has become mainstream in the past decade due to the adoption of these ideas by major corporations. This has led to a rebranding of diet culture, instead of its dismantling.

Instead of dieting, we "eat clean" or cut out meat, dairy, or sugar, and tie our weight-loss goals to "wellness" or "feeling healthy" or some larger sense of social justice. We have been treating childhood obesity and eating disorders as discrete issues for the past forty years. However, eating disorders do happen to kids of all genders, races, socioeconomic statuses, and body sizes, and are the deadliest of all mental illnesses. Subthreshold disordered eating is also a problem, with just over 13 percent of teenagers developing some form of disordered eating. We have spent four decades in a public health panic about rising childhood obesity, and have stoked another fire.

WHY EVERY PARENT NEEDS TO TALK ABOUT FAT

This book is titled Fat Talk, which is a term used by body-image researchers to describe the way we engage in collective body shaming as a form of social currency. It is important to redefine fat talk to stop making fatness the worst-case scenario and start reclaiming it as a perfectly good way to have a body. It will explore how decades of anti-fat bias engineered our current public health conversation about “obesity prevention” and the “childhood obesity epidemic.” It will also consider what it would look like to treat physical and mental health without the scale, known as Health at Every Size or weight-inclusive healthcare. This book examines how diet culture and anti-fat bias intersect with racism and misogyny when kids perform their bodies in public. It argues that if we stop equating "fat" with its negative connotations, it becomes a neutral descriptor like hair color or height.

Activists for fat justice have been working to reclaim "fat" since the 1960s, and to find language for the full spectrum of fatness. The term "Lane Bryant Fat" is used to refer to people who can only wear plus sizes and may have trouble fitting in public spaces. Superfats are those who cannot fit into standard chairs and require special equipment for medical care. The term "straight-sized" is used to refer collectively to people who can find their clothing size in mainstream stores. Thinness is also a spectrum, and a woman who wears a size 10 in her early thirties may have a different experience of her body in public spaces than a woman who wears a size 2.

The most important details in this text are that the harm caused by anti-fat bias occurs on a spectrum related to body size, and that the solution is not to be anti-thin people. It is never our job to label other people, and as a journalist, we make it our practice to ask sources which terms they identify with and use that language when writing about them. However, the American Medical Association designated obesity as an official medical diagnosis in 2013, arguing that conceiving of body size as a disease would improve health outcomes and remove stigma. The term "obese" and "overweight" have become ubiquitous in doctors' offices and the scientific literature, and are associated with a flawed, unruly body. Scientists who identify themselves as "obesity researchers" argue that this stigma doesn't originate with the word itself.

In recognition of the backlash against these terms, obesity researchers have made a push for "person-first" language, such as "person with obesity." This concept has roots in the disability rights community, where many "people with autism" prefer to identify as autistic or neurodivergent. Proponents of "person-first" language argue that we should identify people as people first and then mention their condition, but this is not a critical concern for many fat people. Ragen Chastain, a fat activist and blogger, explains that person-first language increases stigma because it cites a person's struggle in the size of their body, not their experience of the world in that body. To rethink our cultural relationship to fat talk, we need to listen to fat people, and especially fat kids. In reporting this book, the author has interviewed sixty-five parents and forty-five kids from all over the US and Canada, as well as eighty researchers, doctors, therapists, activists, and other thinkers in this space.

Not every fat person thinks alike, of course. This book discusses the impact of anti-fat bias on kids, and how it is rooted in racism and misogyny. It argues that listening to fat people and believing what they say about their bodies will challenge assumptions about weight and health, diet, and exercise. It also explains that fatphobia doesn't happen in a vacuum, but is rooted in racism and misogyny, and that modern diet culture arose in the 1970s, just as we gained the right to birth control and legal abortions. It is important to understand the impact of anti-fat bias on kids, and to start to think more critically about what we can do to make the world a more weight-inclusive space for kids of all sizes.

The decision to overturn Roe v. Wade grants state governments control over the bodies of millions of Americans, especially those of color and people living in poverty. This decision will disproportionately impact fat people, as Plan B is less effective for people who weigh over 155 pounds. Proponents argue that women should be held responsible for their choices and denied healthcare. Additionally, state governments are passing laws that limit the rights of trans people, such as banning trans girls and women from playing on female sports teams and prohibiting all trans youth from using the bathrooms and locker rooms that correspond to their gender identity. Anti-trans legislation is intended to deny access to healthcare and body autonomy to trans people, especially trans kids.