Reviews with content warning for Fatphobia - What's Eating Us: Women, Food, and the Epidemic of Body Anxiety

This book… Bless you Cole Kazdin. I won’t be going into detail about my struggles with weight loss or my relationship with food in this review. Just know that those struggles exist, and I am far from healthy. Physically or mentally… The sad part is that I am not alone.

The epidemic of ED’s in this country is ridiculous and completely avoidable. Unfortunately, I feel like social media will never stop picking apart women’s bodies, so we have to take matters into our own hands.

Cole highlights in this book the importance of our mindset and how we view food. Or rather, our relationship with food. The importance of seeking nutrients that our body needs, rather than eliminating “bad foods” and picking up another fad diet that we know won’t work. Moderation is key to a physically/mentally/emotionally healthy lifestyle.

This book is part memoir, investigative reporting, a dash of self-help and completely feminist. I would genuinely recommend this books to every woman who is unsatisfied with her body. Because it truly is NOT our faults.

TW’s: obviously there are discussions of ED’s.

HAES (Health At Every Size) is mentioned in this book, and to be honest, I still have mixed feeling on the movement. Do your own research in this department.

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sophieheinrichs's review against another edition

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challenging emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

4.5

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likemindedbooks's review

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emotional funny hopeful informative medium-paced

4.0

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final_girl's review against another edition

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challenging reflective medium-paced

4.0

Whenever we begin a conversation about women and weight there will be a lot to unpack. Women almost universally experience anxiety about their bodies, their diet, and their weight. Kazdin starts a very honest and factual discussion about diet culture, disordered eating, and the astounding pressure women feel each day to change their bodies to be anything other than what they are. [NetGalley ARC]

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leif's review against another edition

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challenging emotional informative reflective medium-paced

3.75

Thank you to NetGalley for access to an ARC of this book.

RATING: 3.75/5

What’s Eating Us was a challenging book to read for many reasons. I was instantly intrigued upon seeing the title and description of this book as an examination of women, disordered eating, and body anxiety. As someone who was socialized as a woman, experienced firsthand the impact of disordered eating on my friends, and struggled with my concerns related to body image, I knew I needed to read this book.

Let’s start with the good. The best part of this book is the way that Kazdin used her background in journalism to investigate disordered eating and support her personal experiences with data and stories of other women impacted by body anxiety. I have already immersed myself into conversations and activism around posh positivity, body neutrality, and other liberation movements and so I feel like this book would have more punch for someone who still has a lot of healing to do in that sense. I found this style of data-backed investigative non-fiction paired well with Kazdin’s own stories, which are interwoven throughout this book. Kadzin’s deeply personal experiences are so poignant and I couldn’t help but find myself relating, empathizing, and sometimes deeply disturbed by her writing.

As much as Kazdin’s strong narrative voice was an asset to this book, it was also part of what made this book so deeply uncomfortable to read at some points. Some elements of the book are, in my opinion, not handled with enough delicacy, especially considering that Kazdin is hyper-aware of the impact of “diet talk” and how triggering it can be. For example, rather than discuss calories or weight in a general sense, Kazdin instead will detail specific numbers (such as how many calories she would eat on a deficit or what her lowest weight was) or even repeat certain thoughts far more than I’d deem necessary to get her point across (like expressing that she wants to lose ten pounds seven separate times).

These faults aside, this book is incredibly valuable and hopefully will continue to fuel the conversation around body anxiety and disordered eating. As Kazdin herself points out, “eating disorders have the second highest mortality rate of any mental illness” and yet we don’t talk about them nearly enough, let alone with the gravity and care that this nuanced topic deserves.

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