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A review by lory_enterenchanted
What's Eating Us: Women, Food, and the Epidemic of Body Anxiety by Cole Kazdin
Arising out of both the author's personal experience and research into eating disorders, this book has some important points to make: the booming diet industry is a fraud that is making people fatter and sicker. It is often in evil league with the eating-disorder recovery industry, similarly a field with flashy advertising and dismal results that serve to feed its repeat business model. Another eye-opener was the bias toward people of color, who are not diagnosed or treated for or even considered capable of having eating disorders, a deadly form of bias that exacerbates the racial trauma that makes this population vulnerable in the first place.
It's a field that needs much more attention and compassionate understanding, and I'm glad to have read this book as a start towards learning more. It made a personal difference for me, too, because in the course of reading it, I realized that I too have suffered from an eating disorder -- binge eating disorder, which Kazdin only mentions in passing although it's the most common ED in the United States.
And that brings up something that bothered me about the book. Passionate and compelling though it is on certain aspects of the topic, notably those to which the author has a personal connection (diet culture, infertility), it is not a thorough or comprehensive treatment. There are large holes in the research regarding things that even I know about -- the emerging connection between gut dysbiosis and obesity, for example. She dismisses gluten-free and sugar-free diets as symptoms of buying into the food-restriction philosophy, completely overlooking the evidence that these substances can have actual adverse effects on our physiology. She touches on the biochemical brain factors now being explored with eating disorders, but only briefly, not really exploring the link to other addictive behaviors and mental illnesses. And so on. Not everything can be blamed on diet culture and body-image expectations, but that's what gets the most attention here.
While said "diet culture" does rightly deserve the criticism, there is almost no coverage of the emotional, interpersonal, and family-history issues that play into the disease, under the level of the outward behavior -- as with any addiction. Kazdin was helped to change her behavior by a behavioral therapist, but not to delve into its sources, and she doesn't really try to do it herself. Is she being protective of her family? (Her father is mentioned at the beginning as having some weird food hangups himself, but then disappears from the narrative, except for using his pull as a prominent psychologist to help Kazdin get treatment). Does she not want to know about this aspect of her own disease? Both as reportage and as memoir, there seems to be something missing here.
In addition to being left wanting more substance at the end, I was not a fan of Kazdin's colloquial style (with phraseology including "So I was like..." to mean "I said" and "Yay?" to represent mixed feelings). This was probably meant to be disarming and give a more personal tone to the book, but I found it off-putting and distracting. However engaging they may be when delivered in person, on the bald medium of the printed page such expressions stand out oddly, to me, at least in this context. Probably a matter of personal taste, but there it is.
In spite of my caveats, I do recommend the book, because (as Kazdin also points out) there is a dearth of research and fruitful dialogue around eating disorders. And I admire her honesty and courage in telling her story, although I think she deserved better editing and help with developing her project before publication. I hope that more and more voices will emerge to protest the wrongs that are being done in the name of "health", to tell their stories, and to educate us about a better way forward.
Thanks to NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review the book.
It's a field that needs much more attention and compassionate understanding, and I'm glad to have read this book as a start towards learning more. It made a personal difference for me, too, because in the course of reading it, I realized that I too have suffered from an eating disorder -- binge eating disorder, which Kazdin only mentions in passing although it's the most common ED in the United States.
And that brings up something that bothered me about the book. Passionate and compelling though it is on certain aspects of the topic, notably those to which the author has a personal connection (diet culture, infertility), it is not a thorough or comprehensive treatment. There are large holes in the research regarding things that even I know about -- the emerging connection between gut dysbiosis and obesity, for example. She dismisses gluten-free and sugar-free diets as symptoms of buying into the food-restriction philosophy, completely overlooking the evidence that these substances can have actual adverse effects on our physiology. She touches on the biochemical brain factors now being explored with eating disorders, but only briefly, not really exploring the link to other addictive behaviors and mental illnesses. And so on. Not everything can be blamed on diet culture and body-image expectations, but that's what gets the most attention here.
While said "diet culture" does rightly deserve the criticism, there is almost no coverage of the emotional, interpersonal, and family-history issues that play into the disease, under the level of the outward behavior -- as with any addiction. Kazdin was helped to change her behavior by a behavioral therapist, but not to delve into its sources, and she doesn't really try to do it herself. Is she being protective of her family? (Her father is mentioned at the beginning as having some weird food hangups himself, but then disappears from the narrative, except for using his pull as a prominent psychologist to help Kazdin get treatment). Does she not want to know about this aspect of her own disease? Both as reportage and as memoir, there seems to be something missing here.
In addition to being left wanting more substance at the end, I was not a fan of Kazdin's colloquial style (with phraseology including "So I was like..." to mean "I said" and "Yay?" to represent mixed feelings). This was probably meant to be disarming and give a more personal tone to the book, but I found it off-putting and distracting. However engaging they may be when delivered in person, on the bald medium of the printed page such expressions stand out oddly, to me, at least in this context. Probably a matter of personal taste, but there it is.
In spite of my caveats, I do recommend the book, because (as Kazdin also points out) there is a dearth of research and fruitful dialogue around eating disorders. And I admire her honesty and courage in telling her story, although I think she deserved better editing and help with developing her project before publication. I hope that more and more voices will emerge to protest the wrongs that are being done in the name of "health", to tell their stories, and to educate us about a better way forward.
Thanks to NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review the book.