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A review by bookph1le
The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America by Virginia Sole-Smith
5.0
Part memoir and part sanity check for people who, like me, have stewed in diet culture (now rebranded as wellness culture!) for far too long. Sole-Smith writes so movingly of the harrowing trauma of navigating her daughter's heart condition and the eating issues that followed her surgeries. In trying various methods to help her daughter learn how to eat again, Sole-Smith began to see connections to the ways in which our obsession with weight and our assigning morality to food has compromised Americans' abilities to remain in tune with their own eating instincts.
This book is wide ranging and very thought-provoking. Though I've been on this journey to undo all the damage years of dieting and diet culture have done to me for some time now, this book still helped me to gain a new perspective on my own relationship to food. I appreciated the ways in which she points out the intersection of diet culture and chronic illness and food insecurity, because all of these things are inextricably entwined. Our insistence that eating the right foods can protect us from illness--new flash, they can't--is tied up in our belief that fatness is a moral failing rather than a complex issue driven by many factors. Sole-Smith highlights research that shows how complex this issue is, and does so in a way that's accessible and understandable.
Her writing is also just plain fantastic. She has such empathy for the people she interviews and has such a nuanced view of health and diet culture. Anyone looking to try to break free of the hold diet and wellness culture exerts over all of us would do well to include this book in their repertoire.
This book is wide ranging and very thought-provoking. Though I've been on this journey to undo all the damage years of dieting and diet culture have done to me for some time now, this book still helped me to gain a new perspective on my own relationship to food. I appreciated the ways in which she points out the intersection of diet culture and chronic illness and food insecurity, because all of these things are inextricably entwined. Our insistence that eating the right foods can protect us from illness--new flash, they can't--is tied up in our belief that fatness is a moral failing rather than a complex issue driven by many factors. Sole-Smith highlights research that shows how complex this issue is, and does so in a way that's accessible and understandable.
Her writing is also just plain fantastic. She has such empathy for the people she interviews and has such a nuanced view of health and diet culture. Anyone looking to try to break free of the hold diet and wellness culture exerts over all of us would do well to include this book in their repertoire.