TBR Pile Review: “You Just Need To Lose Weight” and 19 other myths about fat people, by Aubrey Gordon

Blurb

The co-host of the Maintenance Phase podcast and creator of Your Fat Friend equips you with the facts to debunk common anti-fat myths and with tools to take action for fat justice

The pushback that shows up in conversations about fat justice takes exceedingly predicable form. Losing weight is easy—calories in, calories out. Fat people are unhealthy. We’re in the midst of an obesity epidemic. Fat acceptance “glorifies obesity.” The BMI is an objective measure of size and health. Yet, these myths are as readily debunked as they are pervasive.

In “You Just Need to Lose Weight,” Aubrey Gordon equips readers with the facts and figures to reframe myths about fatness in order to dismantle the anti-fat bias ingrained in how we think about and treat fat people. Bringing her dozen years of community organizing and training to bear, Gordon shares the rhetorical approaches she and other organizers employ to not only counter these pernicious myths, but to dismantle the anti-fat bias that so often underpin them.

As conversations about fat acceptance and fat justice continue to grow, “You Just Need to Lose Weight” will be essential to ensure that those conversations are informed, effective, and grounded in both research and history.

My Review

I had this book on pre-order. I listen to Maintenance Phase. I have Gordon’s earlier book What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat as an audiobook. So, you might assume this is going to be a gushing post.

Well, it isn’t. Not that I didn’t enjoy it. I did, it was interesting and I am going to whip it out every time I get into an argument with a bigot with anti-fat bias. Aubrey Gordon does a lot of digging into the research about fatness, and the structure of this book allows you to find the information that you need in answer to the usual myths they throw at fat people.

A lot of this information is already available in different places, and if you’ve read other books on the subjects of fat activism, fat acceptance, body positivity, body neutrality and anti-diet, if you listen to podcasts on the subject, or follow Instagram people interested in the subject, you will probably have heard about it.

If you’re new to fat activism it’s a really good introduction, or, if you regularly need to respond to these myths, this is a useful file of information. With references.