What's Wrong with Fat?

Fascinating and illuminating. --The New York Times Abigail Saguy asks the kinds of questions that can shift scientific paradigms, challenge prejudice, and promote social justice for people of all sizes. She backs up her clear-headed analysis of mainstream belief systems with carefully conducted research that reveals the inherent linkage between how we think about weight and how such beliefs shape not only health, but also lives and society. Anyone who's stepped on a scale or seen a media report about the so-called obesity epidemic will benefit from exploring What's Wrong with Fat? -- Marilyn Wann, author of FAT!SO? In this pathbreaking book, Abigail Saguy explores the social implications of viewing fatness as a public health crisis. Saguy's conclusions challenge conventional understandings of obesity as a moral and medical problem and draws attention to the debilitating consequences of weight-based stigma. This book is essential reading for anyone concerned about public policy and cultural consciousness on matters affecting weight. --Deborah L. Rhode, author of The Beauty Bias 'What's wrong?' is the most basic question we can ask about a social problem. At first glance, the answer may seem obvious. But Abigail Saguy's careful analysis of contemporary claims about fat reveals that it's a question that can be answered in many competing ways, and any apparent consensus is rooted in particular times, places, and social arrangements. This book invites us to think, not just about fat, but about other weighty issues. --Joel Best, author of Everyone's a Winner What's Wrong with Fat? excels at something sociology can do quite well-displace simple answers with a razor-sharp questioning of the question. In this lucid and comprehensive account, Saguy teases apart the different threads of contemporary discourse about obesity and investigates the potent real-world consequences of our competing ways of thinking about this social, moral, and medica