Summary of Fat Talk by Virginia Sole-Smith: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture

By GP SUMMARY

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This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.

 

Summary of Fat Talk by Virginia Sole-Smith: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture

 

IN THIS SUMMARIZED BOOK, YOU WILL GET:

 

• Chapter astute outline of the main contents.
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Virginia Sole-Smith's book Fat Talk exposes the daily onslaught of fatphobia and body shaming that kids face from school, sports, doctors, diet culture, and parents. It offers strategies for how families can change the conversation around weight, health, and self-worth. It also offers a new approach for thinking about food and bodies, and a way for us to work towards a more weight-inclusive world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookRix
• Release date: Apr 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9783755440383

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Summary of Fat Talk

A

Summary of Virginia Sole-Smith’s book

Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture

GP SUMMARY

Summary of Fat Talk by Virginia Sole-Smith: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture

By GP SUMMARY© 2023, GP SUMMARY.

All rights reserved.

Author: GP SUMMARY

Contact: [e-mail]

Cover, illustration: GP SUMMARY

Editing, proofreading: GP SUMMARY

Other collaborators: GP SUMMARY

NOTE TO READERS

This is an unofficial summary & analysis of Virginia Sole-Smith’s Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture designed to enrich your reading experience.

DISCLAIMER

The contents of the summary are not intended to replace the original book. It is meant as a supplement to enhance the reader's understanding. The contents within can neither be stored electronically, transferred, nor kept in a database. Neither part nor full can the document be copied, scanned, faxed, or retained without the approval from the publisher or creator.

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Copyright 2023. All rights reserved.

PART 1 : Fat Talk: An Initiation

When the narrator's daughters were five and two, they ran into Barbara, an old family friend who had not seen them since they were much tinier. Barbara complimented Violet's long ballerina legs and Beatrix's short and rounder legs. The narrator wondered how much the comment had sunk in, as studies have shown that kids as young as three associate fat bodies with negative traits. The narrator was a thin kid once, but her body changed in the late '90s, when Britney Spears's exposed torso, Delia's catalog, Kate Moss's heroin chic, and halter crop tops and low-rise jeans were popular. Our culture, dominated by whiteness and patriarchy, slices bodies apart into discrete, idealized shapes.

We are taught to equate our worth with our body size, ignoring how we know that body size is mercurial. Complimenting a thin child reinforces the idea that thin bodies are better than fat bodies. We want our children to love their bodies, but we also want them to be thin. Unlearning this core belief about the importance of thinness means deciding that both thin and fat bodies have equal value. This requires challenging traditional beliefs about health, b eauty, and morality.

THE WRONG EPIDEMIC

Anti-fat bias is the hatred of fatness that results in the stigmatization of fat people in almost every realm of society. Research shows that four out of five Americans hold some level of anti-fat bias and that our implicit dislike of fatness is increasing. Activists use the terms fatphobia and anti-fatness interchangeably, with a slight preference for anti-fat bias because it is often a manufactured anxiety taught to us by biased institutions and systems. Parents experience their fatphobia as a kind of terror, though, because antifatness goes well beyond an aesthetic bias. The belief system that thin is better than fat has been rooted in decades of public health policies, diet culture messaging, food advertising, and other forms of public discourse.

This bias is a chicken-and-egg-style conundrum, as there is no concrete data showing that a high body weight causes health problems like diabetes, heart disease, and asthma. However, there is a chicken-and-egg-style conundrum in how we parent our children, as weight has become a measure of their current and future health and happiness, as well as our own success or failure as parents. There is a further push-pull of anxieties around our children's weight right now. The message of body positivity originated with second-wave feminism and early fat rights activism, but has become mainstream in the past decade due to the adoption of these ideas by major corporations. This has led to a rebranding of diet culture, instead of its dismantling.

Instead of dieting, we eat clean or cut out meat, dairy, or sugar, and tie our weight-loss goals to wellness or feeling healthy or some larger sense of social justice. We have been treating childhood obesity and eating disorders as discrete issues for the past forty years. However, eating disorders do happen to kids of all genders, races, socioeconomic statuses, and body sizes, and are the deadliest of all mental illnesses. Subthreshold disordered eating is also a problem, with just over 13 percent of teenagers developing some form of disordered eating. We have spent four decades in a public health panic about rising childhood obesity, and have stoked another fire.

WHY EVERY PARENT NEEDS TO TALK ABOUT FAT

This book is titled Fat Talk, which is a term used by body-image researchers to describe the way we engage in collective body shaming as a form of social currency. It is important to redefine fat talk to stop making fatness the worst-case scenario and start reclaiming it as a perfectly good way to have a body. It will explore how decades of anti-fat bias engineered our current public health conversation about obesity prevention and the childhood obesity epidemic. It will also consider what it would look like to treat physical and mental health without the scale, known as Health at Every Size or weight-inclusive healthcare. This book examines how diet culture and anti-fat bias intersect with racism and misogyny when kids perform their bodies in public. It argues that if we stop equating fat with its negative connotations, it becomes a neutral descriptor like hair color or height.

Activists for fat justice have been working to reclaim fat since the 1960s, and to find language for the full spectrum of fatness. The term Lane Bryant Fat is used to refer to people who can only wear plus sizes and may have trouble fitting in public spaces. Superfats are those who cannot fit into standard chairs and require special equipment for medical care. The term straight-sized is used to refer collectively to people who can find their clothing size in mainstream stores. Thinness is also a spectrum, and a woman who wears a size 10 in her early thirties may have a different experience of her body in public spaces than a woman who wears a size 2.

The most important details in this text are that the harm caused by anti-fat bias occurs on a spectrum related to body size, and that the solution is not to be anti-thin people. It is never our job to label other people, and as a journalist, we make it our practice to ask sources which terms they identify with and use that language when writing about them. However, the American Medical Association designated obesity as an official medical diagnosis in 2013, arguing that conceiving of body size as a disease would improve health outcomes and remove stigma. The term obese and overweight have become ubiquitous in doctors' offices and the scientific literature, and are associated with a flawed, unruly body. Scientists who identify themselves as obesity researchers argue that this stigma doesn't originate with the word itself.

In recognition of the backlash against these terms, obesity researchers have made a push for person-first language, such as person with obesity.