num_pages: 196
description: Heavy Burdens: Stories of Motherhood and Fatness seeks to address the systemic ways in which the moral panic around obesity impacts fat mothers and fat children. Taking a life-course approach the book begins with analyses of the ways in which fatphobia is enacted on pregnant (or even not-yet-pregnant) women whose bodies immediately become viewed as objects warranting external control by not only medical professionals but family members and even passers-by. The story unfolds as adults recount childhood stories of growing up fat or growing up in fear of being fat and how their mothers relationships with their own bodies and attempted weight-loss experiences shaped how food exercise and body management were approached in their homes in sometimes harmful ways. Finally the book concludes with stories of women who have since become mothers examining the ways in which having their own children altered their views on their own bodies and their perceptions of their mothers actions and working to find fat-friendly futures via their own parenting (or grand-parenting) techniques.
language: None
title: Heavy Burdens: Stories of Motherhood and Fatness
publisher: Demeter Press