Body Respect

What Conventional Health Books Get Wrong, Leave Out, and Just Plain Fail to Understand About Weight

By: Linda Bacon PhD, Lucy Aphramor PhD RD

Narrated by: Celeste Oliva

Length: 4 hrs and 51 mins

Publisher's summary

Mainstream health science has let you down. Weight loss is not the key to health, diet and exercise are not effective weight-loss strategies, and fatness is not a death sentence.

You've heard it before: There's a global health crisis, and unless we make some changes, we're in trouble. That much is true - but the epidemic is not obesity. The real crisis lies in the toxic stigma placed on certain bodies and the impact of living with inequality - not the numbers on a scale.

In a mad dash to shrink our bodies, many of us get so caught up in searching for the perfect diet, exercise program, or surgical technique that we lose sight of our original goal: improved health and well-being. Popular methods for weight loss don't get us there and lead many people to feel like failures when they can't match unattainable body standards. It's time for a cease-fire in the war against obesity.

Dr. Linda Bacon and Dr. Lucy Aphramor's Body Respect debunks common myths about weight, including the misconceptions that BMI can accurately measure health, that fatness necessarily leads to disease, and that dieting will improve health. They also help make sense of how poverty and oppression - such as racism, homophobia, and classism - affect life opportunity, self-worth, and even influence metabolism.

Body insecurity is rampant, and it doesn't have to be. It's time to overcome our culture's shame and distress about weight, to get real about inequalities and health, and to show every body respect.

©2014 Linda Bacon, PhD, and Lucy Aphramor, PhD, RD (P)2018 Tantor

Excellent Book

Outstanding analysis on the intersection between diet culture and matters of social justice. Worth the quick listen!

This Should Be Required Reading in Health Classes

Reading this was like consuming chicken soup for the diet-worn soul. Great deep dive into health science and diet studies, easy to digest (no pun intended), and gave me several ah-ha moments. Allowed me to understand myself and the dominant culture of thinness and diets better. A really good read, but also incredibly helpful on my journey to body neutrality. I would recommend it to everyone and think this should be required reading for all youth in school health classes.

Eye Opening and Profound

I can't stop talking about this book to my friends and coworkers. The authors cite numerous studies of which I followed up on several. The cases I looked in to were, from what I can tell, well documented, peer reviewed and did not seem skewed towards or away from an outcome.

The authors lay out a compelling case for the H.A.E.S movement and every fat person should be armed with at least some of this information before going to a doctor.

HIGHLY RECOMMEND

Inspiring and important

Important read for all wanting to improve their relationship with their body, and to also understand how the view of one's body can uphold the systems of oppression we want to dismantle.

Read This

Quite simply the best and holistic book I have ever read in regards to wellness EVER!

Powerful Information!

My hope is that one day, all of our health care providers, coaches, personal trainers, nutritionists, and concern trolls on every social media post about weight and health could hear, understand, and heed the knowledge in this book.

Great content, mundane reader

A great listen, provokes lots of inner reflection. Be kind to yourself. Loved the content but the reader/narrator was very mundane and difficult to focus on. Felt very textbook like. Hope they do an update for a more captivating narrator for the future.

An Important lesson to all health professionals

As someone who works in healthcare and hears the word “overweight” and “obesity” be tossed around a lot it’s very rare to hear a complete dissection of what these terms mean and how this impacts what we already know from lived experience from people living in larger bodies going on diets and not reaching the goal that they’ve been taught to strive for- long-term weight loss. I love how it gives the science/medical explanation of how this Weight normative paradigm is problematic and can do harm but then also expanded to a larger discussion on social justice respect and compassion.

Game changer

This book is excellent and has changed everything I thought I knew (the things that we’ve been taught by culture) about health, wellness, and weight. I am deeply thankful to Dr. Bacon for her work and to Dr. Aphramor. A must read!

Enlightening

I am so relieved to hear this information. Allowing your body to set your fullness and listening to the cues it gives greatly reduces my stress.