A review by kristinv20
What's Eating Us: Women, Food, and the Epidemic of Body Anxiety by Cole Kazdin

emotional hopeful informative reflective medium-paced

4.0

i got this book and literally less than a week later got diagnosed with disordered eating patterns, so i decided to hold off on reading it until i got everything sorted out personally and that was a good decision. it's very well written, but extremely visceral and would not have been good for me two months ago (or maybe it would've smacked me out of it, who's to say). Kazdin does a really great job exploring diet culture, the recovery-industrial complex, and the effects of eating disorders in her personal life. her prose makes this lean more toward the memoir side of nonfiction, which has the benefit of feeling more accessible but the negative effect of sometimes obfuscating scientific information and allowing the author's bias into areas that could've remained objective. i would've appreciated a bit more on some of the scientific background, both on actual eating disorders and on their mechanisms of treatment--Kazdin lets her own personal experiences really color her depictions of treatments and therapies, and while that's effective in showing what she went through it could scare people off therapies that would be beneficial for them. overall this was a really fascinating exploration of diet culture, and while there's areas it could improve on i found it very solid overall. 

arc provided by St. Martin's and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review
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