A review by leif
What's Eating Us: Women, Food, and the Epidemic of Body Anxiety by Cole Kazdin

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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