Abigail Saguy

The United States, we are told, is facing an obesity epidemic, a "battle of the bulge" that requires drastic and immediate action. Some have predicted that, due to increasing rates of overweight and obesity, this generation will be the first to die at a younger age than their parents. Obesityhas been blamed for increasing healthcare expenditure, rising costs of airplane travel, and even global warming. How and why has obesity exploded onto the public health agenda? How does this perspective of obesity as a crisis - as well as how we assign blame and responsibility for obesity - affecthow we feel about our bodies? And how does it inform how medical professionals and the general public treat visibly fat people? Drawing on interviews, statistical analyses, and experimental studies, Abigail Saguy examines the implications of understanding fatness as a medical health risk, disease, and epidemic, and how we've come to understand the issue in these terms. Saguy argues that our current fears build upon acentury-old distaste for fat as a marker of moral failing and low social status. Economic, professional, and political incentives, she demonstrates, have also contributed to the social construction of obesity as a medical problem and as a public health crisis. She also shows how scientific debatesover the relationship between body size and health risk take place within a larger, though often invisible, debate over whether we should understand - or frame - fatness as obesity at all.From obesity to fat acceptance, Saguy examines the various frames in which the idea of fat is viewed - and most importantly acted upon - today. Controversially, she argues that public discussions of the obesity crisis are actually creating the phenomenon that they claim to be dispassionatelyexploring. From the categories we use to discuss overweight and obesity, to the way we frame the crisis, we are literally making ourselves fat. Finally, What's Wrong with Fat? reveals the collateral damage - including the intensification of negative body image and justification of weight-baseddiscrimination - of the war on fat.

Abigail Saguy

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