Reviews

Fat Talk: Coming of Age in Diet Culture by Virginia Sole-Smith

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prettypious's review against another edition

5.0

Highly recommend this text to really understand antifatness, fat phobia, and how you might be part of the problem by simply existing in a society that is so prolifically antifat or anti larger bodies. I particularly like the intentionally ways the author consistently grapples with issues related to race, ethnicity and SES in how we both talk about and experience fatness.

jennnafziger's review against another edition

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5.0

This book is well researched and is a great resource for adults to who wish to have encouraging, body-positive conversations with young people. I wish that the adults in my life had been given this information when I was young. This book challenged me as a teacher and will guide the way I conduct my classes and conversations about bodies in the future. I highly recommend this to all who interact with young people. We should be creating safe spaces for all bodies to exist.

daffodiv's review against another edition

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they took it off of hoopla! not interested in spending a credit on it!

juliacalkins's review against another edition

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informative medium-paced

4.5

lflbooks's review against another edition

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emotional informative inspiring medium-paced

5.0

bookph1le's review against another edition

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5.0

This is such a good and sadly necessary book. Sole-Smith excels at taking complex issues and ideas and distilling them in an absorbing way that really makes you think. This book wasn't a fun read, but I found it very compelling and even though I've been deep in the work of divesting from diet culture for some time now, it made me think about a lot of things I hadn't really considered yet. I don't doubt, though, that this will mostly be a polarizing book. Readers like me, who see diet culture as toxic and are trying to untangle from it, will get a lot out of this, and that's good. What's not so good is that people who are invested in diet culture probably won't--and they're the ones who need it most. Of course, this is true of any structural bias. The only way to tear it down is to see it for what it is, but humans are tragically terrible as seeing structural bias clearly.

That probably sounds pessimistic, but I do have hope. I appreciate the many journalists, activists, and medical professionals doing this work, and I am hopeful that future generations will have a much healthier relationship with their bodies and with food and health than previous generations have.