A review by evdark
What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon

informative sad medium-paced

3.25

There is a fine line between body positivity and endorsing a deadly lifestyle. I do get that the author said that she eats healthy, exercises, and is almost 400 lbs. She cites Lizzo as another person who is "athletic and fat" as proof of her point that you can do everything right and be fat. That did not age well as Lizzo dropped over 100 lbs due to her activity on stage. The part of this book I enjoyed was about how diet culture hurts society and reinforces terrible habits in overweight individuals, barring them from losing weight while also shaming them for it. It probably does mess with the metabolism so much that when you try extreme dieting at a certain weight, you can die trying to lose the weight, too much too fast, too little too late. Another part was how doctors treat overweight and highly obese individuals, which I have experienced even as a "small fat person" (after pregnancy). What I did not enjoy about this book was that this author would probably be happy if every person in the world were fat, based on her manifesto at the back of the book, and that we shouldn't try to improve ourselves but give into that lifestyle and embrace it. That fat people should be celebrated and catered to and embraced as a standard of normality. That's a dangerous mindset to have, especially in light of several body-positive influencers dying due to their weight.
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