num_pages: 304
description: Over the last 25 years our longing for thinness has morphed into a relentless cultural obsession with weight and body image. You can't be a woman or girl (or increasingly a man or boy) in America today and not grapple with the size and shape of your body your daughter's body other women's bodies. Even the most confident people have to find a way through a daily gauntlet of voices and images talking admonishing warning us about what size we should be how much we should weigh what we should eat and what we shouldn't. Obsessing about weight has become a ritual and a refrain punctuating our every relationship including the ones with ourselves. It's time to change the conversation around weight. Harriet Brown has explored the conundrums of weight and body image for more than a decade as a science journalist as a woman who has struggled with weight as a mother wife and professor. In this book she describes how biology psychology metabolism media and culture come together to shape our ongoing obsession with our bodies and what we can learn from them to help us shift the way we think. Brown exposes some of the myths behind the rhetoric of obesity gives historical and contemporary context for what it means to be fat and offers readers ways to set aside the hysteria and think about weight and health in more nuanced and accurate ways.
language: English
title: Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight--and What We Can Do about It
publisher: Da Capo Lifelong Books