Books and Reviews on Weightloss, Health and Obesity

tk2222

Don't know about anyone else, but I tend to be an obsessive reader about whatever I'm interested in. I also find that engaging with weight-loss-stuff daily keeps me motivated and on track on some psychological level. Rather than reading one more blog entry about recipies for kale under 300 calories every day, I've found myself getting into literature on the politics and discourse of weighloss, health, fitness, etc.

Because I am a perverse and obstrepious type, the more critical and skeptical, the better. I seem to be interested in a strangely narrow zone of works surrounded by holistic miracle everything-fixes through better eating nonsense on one side, and equally lightly reality-adjacent fat-acceptance, everything-is-fine stuff on the other. I'm trying to seek out writing that considers the social and personal issues of weight with an eye that is realistic, complex and nuanced without being cheerleaders. It seems to be a drearily short list.

So as not to spam my feed with reviews and random observations, I figured I'd post here and hopefully get some debate and particularly more reading recommendations going, because I'm starting to run out!

What I have so far:
- The Angry Chef: Bad Science and the Truth About Healthy Eating, Anthony Warner, 2017
- Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice and the Limits of Capitalism, Julie Guthman, 2011
- Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health, Charlotte Biltekoff, 2013
- Why Calories Count: From Science to Politics, Mario Nestle, Malden Nasheim, 2012
- Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, Roxanne Gay, 2017

tk2222

The Angry Chef, Anthony Warner, 2017:

Nice, straightforward tear-down of eating fashions, fad diets, 'that one trick', superfoods, etc, and drawing on research to debunk various claims of toxicity or raw food or coconut oil or wahtever is going on at the moment. This includes current semi-concensus favorites like paleo, keto, and even 'clean and unprocessed'. You have been warned. (I was sure he was overstating the sexiness of the coconut oil thing, but then just last week heard two women in my office frantically discussing whether they've had a spoon of coconut oil today or not. It's OIL, people. You don't have a spoon of canola a day, do you, and call it a weightloss aid?)

Equally interesting, though a bit more tenuous (social sciences are not his field), is the attack/analysis on the sociology of the 'lifestyle' rhetotic of dieting. This is not to say that he doesn't espouse developing a physcially and psychologically healthy lifelong relationship with food - he does. But he identifies a hypocricy and elitism in the 'healthy lifestyle' language that talks about the ability of switching to some restrictive (and usually expensive and exotic) diet to lead to some holistic lifestyle change. Not just aspirationally-nonsensical, he makes an argument that 'healthy' or 'whole' has essentially come to stand in for 'thin' anyway, its just that thinness has become a dirty word.

Also curious but too thinly referenced to be entirely persuasive is the broader social argument about class and gender here, with the calls for home cooked meals (and entire fantasy of rhetoric around it) essentially being read as a call to either drag women back into the kitchen or guilt those that can't or won't. Likewise, the (lengthy) arguments on the psychological suceptibility of people for diety mumbo-jumbo are a little tedious and repetitive, and have a speculative, pointificating quality. (The writing gimmick of a silly back and forth between internal voices grows stale and annoying pretty fast too. I wish a good editor had forced him to dial it back.)

What does he recommend? Basically, all in moderation and consideration, including, yes, processed foods and the ocassional junk food and all - with a decent appreciation for the pleasure and social purpose of food. No magic solutions, no particular nutrient or process or pattern that especially good for you or especially bad for you, just the development of a complex and nuanced relationship with your food and body, that encompasses both pleasure and restraint, knowledge and intuition. Damn, eh?

tk2222

Weighing in: Obesity, Food Justice and the Limits of Capitalism,
Julie Guthman, 2011.

This was an interesting counterpoint to the Angry Chef - a much more academic book (from UC California food studies series) but with a readable, relatively populist bend. Guthman IS a social scientist, and she comes from a contextual/marxist sort of tradition (If the title didn't give it away), so analyses obesity as a social issue - both what is actually happening, and what is being talked about and presented as a political issue.

On some of the actual science, there's points of straight up disagreement with Angry Chef, particularly the role of environmental toxicity and exposure on obesity (AC is pretty vehement in arguing that 'toxins' are nonsense.) She also doesn't go as much, for example, into the difficulties of getting accurate calorie consumption/expenditure data and the variability there, making the attempts to infer genuine obesity trends and causes from national-level stats on caloric availability rather wonky.

On the other hand, her framing of the class, ethics and moral issues that have come to surround weight and obesity are much more incisive and far-reaching. Thinness as a class marker is backed by other writing i'm familiar with on class in the USA (Currid-Halkett, Reeves, for just 2017,) but Guthman goes further to tie the monitoring and shaming of fatness as an evolution of missionary logics, telling the natives how to eat and how to feed their kids. Her quotes from her students - supposedly good liberals who just want to help people learn how to eat right - are illuminating, for their very thinly buried classism and disgust, as well as obvious fear of being fat themselves, and loathing the idea of that fatness as an aesthetic and a judgement on character rather than much about dry cut physical health as such.

Whether this kind of high social cost coming attached to fat is helpful or not in making people make healthy choices about their food and weight is an interesting question, and one that I think isn't being addressed far enough. Even a relatively fat-positive writer like Guthman (she isn't in what I'd call the fat-acceptance camp, more in a 'take note of what you talk about when you talk about fat' camp. She doesn't suggest that there's not a lot of value to people to get their health in check, (though she also questions the BMI as a single measure or supposed health costs of the obesity epidemic) - quite to the contrary, she identifies the social and economic advantages accruing to a thin body in a kind of dialectic with rich and high-class people being thin in the first place.

Would the severing of that tie (not that its possible on a social level of course, but lets say in our heads) and turning more or less fat into purely a reflection on our levels of tryglicerides or statistical likeliness to develop an illness twenty years down the line, help or hinder healthy weight?

OliveGirl128

I've read over 50 books on diet/nutrition/food and I'd only recommend 4 of them

General:

Rethinking Thin, by Gina Kolata
https://www.amazon.com/Rethinking-Thin-Science-Loss-Realities/dp/0312427859

Diet Cults, by Matt Fitzgerald
https://www.amazon.com/Diet-Cults-Surprising-Fallacy-Nutrition/dp/1605985600/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1502476062&sr=1-1&keywords=diet+cults

IF related, (the plan I've followed in some form for several years now):

The Fast Diet
https://www.amazon.com/FastDiet-Revised-Updated-Healthy-Intermittent/dp/150110201X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1502476129&sr=1-1&keywords=the+fast+diet

The Every Other Day Diet
https://www.amazon.com/Every-Other-Day-Diet-That-Lets-Weight/dp/1401324932/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1502476186&sr=1-1&keywords=the+every+other+day+diet+krista+varady

I could make a list of all the books I've read, that would make excellent toilet paper

GemstoneofHeart

OliveGirl128 wrote: »

I've read over 50 books on diet/nutrition/food and I'd only recommend 4 of them

General:

Rethinking Thin, by Gina Kolata
https://www.amazon.com/Rethinking-Thin-Science-Loss-Realities/dp/0312427859

Diet Cults, by Matt Fitzgerald
https://www.amazon.com/Diet-Cults-Surprising-Fallacy-Nutrition/dp/1605985600/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1502476062&sr=1-1&keywords=diet+cults

IF related, (the plan I've followed in some form for several years now):

The Fast Diet
https://www.amazon.com/FastDiet-Revised-Updated-Healthy-Intermittent/dp/150110201X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1502476129&sr=1-1&keywords=the+fast+diet

The Every Other Day Diet
https://www.amazon.com/Every-Other-Day-Diet-That-Lets-Weight/dp/1401324932/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1502476186&sr=1-1&keywords=the+every+other+day+diet+krista+varady

I could make a list of all the books I've read, that would make excellent toilet paper

Thanks for sharing, these look interesting and I want to read the last two for sure!

vegaslounge

Ooh! Ooh! I am so glad you posted this.

I know this is slightly off what you wanted (debatable weight articles, etc) but, I love reading books and watching documentaries about the subject. Hell, I wouldn't hang out at MFP forums if I didn't

I'm a historian and tour guide, and all throughout my life I've always found diaries to be the best way to really *understand* a people, place, culture and time. You can certainly learn a lot about said people etc by reading historical texts and studying artifacts, but if you really want to delve intothe day-to-day existence, a snapshot of a time and place and person– you cannot go wrong by reading their most private thoughts. Some of my favorites are the diaries of Samuel Pepys (17th century London) and Zlata Filipovic (Bosnian War).

My favorite "weight" book is "Diary of a Fat Housewife: A True Story of Humor, Heart-Break, and Hope" by Rosemary Green. I first read this as a library book 15 years ago and have owned a copy ever since. She pulls no punches– she calls herself "the last honest fat person in America" and makes no excuses for becoming morbidly obese other than laziness and lack of discipline. She has multiple children during the diary's span but never uses the pregnancies as an excuse. Some of the techniques and methods she uses in the diary don't hold luster today, but she kept the diary in the late 80s-early 90s when we didn't have the tools and knowledge we have now. In the edited copy I have, she even amends entries years after she wrote them, saying that she'd learned more about physiology and health than what she'd known at the time.

I really, really recommend this book. Even without the weight-loss angle (weird, since that's the point of the diary), she's a delightful writer and it's a fun read. https://www.amazon.com/Diary-Fat-Housewife-Story-Heart-Break/dp/0446602817

~VL

tk2222

OliveGirl128 wrote: »

I've read over 50 books on diet/nutrition/food and I'd only recommend 4 of them

That statistic sounds about familiar. Why is so much of the writing on this topic such utter junk?

Will definitely check out the first two!

AnvilHead

tk2222 wrote: »

OliveGirl128 wrote: »

I've read over 50 books on diet/nutrition/food and I'd only recommend 4 of them

That statistic sounds about familiar. Why is so much of the writing on this topic such utter junk?

Will definitely check out the first two!

Because "Eat a somewhat reasonable diet consisting of less calories than you expend" isn't sexy and wouldn't sell many books.

sijomial

I really enjoyed The Lean Muscle Diet* by Lou Schuler and Alan Aragon.
Two experts in their fields who also write in an entertaining and informative style

Wish I had found it before I lost my weight as I would have tried for myself their concept of eating and training for your goal rather than your current state.

(* = absolutely cringe making title for the book, what were they thinking? )



PS - I also found The Fast Diet book mentioned above interesting but needs reading with a very critical eye. Some serious cherry picking of research and also extrapolating conclusions from studies of very different forms of IF to his particular eating style.
Hence the fallout between Michael Mosley and Krista Varady.

Old_Cat_Lady

The worst book ever: Susan Power Breathing for weight loss (or something like that). It was at my library. The China Study was also pretty funny.