The Senseless Handling of Fat People (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781917238441)

Every other fat woman feels defeated after meeting a doctor. At the same time, more and more girls in the Western world are starting to diet hard before the age of 14. There is a prevailing ideology that makes us all "want" to be thin. We have been thoroughly conditioned to believe that fatness is a result of personal weakness and immoral behavior, and our caring institutions have acted as moralizing gatekeepers of this inhuman myth. What if all interventions against the so-called obesity epidemic are not only futile but counterproductive and even harmful both to fat people and society as a whole?

"The Senseless Handling of Fat People" is a critical endeavor into the attitudes and ideas behind the launch of an obesity epidemic, a launch that, in turn, has resulted in a worldwide systemic stigmatization of fat people. The book explores the societal drivers that maintain and reinforce the contempt for fat people. It shows that there really are political, social, market-based and medical forces that benefit from your self-contempt.