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Eat Fat
In this tour de force the author traces the older, positive meanings of the word "fat." He analyzes "the thing fat, " discussing not only the aesthetics of fat but also the nature of fat. He examines "fat sex, " including representations of the human body designed to arouse people whose taste in beauty is fat. And he explores "political fat, " i.e., the relation of fat to power.
- GenresNonfictionFoodFat
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1996
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
October 2, 2025
Our hostility toward fat is what traps us in vicious cycles of weight gain and self-loathing. The book's strongest takeaway is realizing that our view of fat is a man-made construct. There's nothing inherent about how we treat it, our attitudes and values around fat are entirely what we make them.
Whether fat is beautiful or disgusting, how it determines health, none of this follows a rigid ruleset. Fat is in the eye of the beholder. Fat deserves to be seen with new perspective. It can be both beautiful and noxious. Allowing yourself to be open to perceiving it through a new lens will broaden, the previously strict, attitudes held over fat.
The disdain we feel makes us externalize fat, treat it as something we carry and want to lose, rather than acknowledging and accepting it as part of ourselves. You are your fat.
Whether fat is beautiful or disgusting, how it determines health, none of this follows a rigid ruleset. Fat is in the eye of the beholder. Fat deserves to be seen with new perspective. It can be both beautiful and noxious. Allowing yourself to be open to perceiving it through a new lens will broaden, the previously strict, attitudes held over fat.
The disdain we feel makes us externalize fat, treat it as something we carry and want to lose, rather than acknowledging and accepting it as part of ourselves. You are your fat.
August 29, 2010
Dove into this, slogged through the word analysis chapter, and enjoyed reading the rest immensely. Writes in a little bit of a "heady" way, but still enjoyable. A nice break from self-help books--more academic.
Some quotes from the book that I found striking:
There is abundant evidence to suggest that attempts to curb your appetite voluntarily encourage the body to make fat, incite the impulse to binge, and are the precipitating cause of many eating disorders. Only four people out of a hundred continue, after dieting, to keep their weight down: 76 percent of all dieters are fatter after three years than they were before they began, and 95 percent after five years. Eating disorders have recently been reported to be twice as widespread as had been thought, and the incidence is steadily rising. According to the Times, “the single most likely culprit for the rising rate of…eating disorders, experts say, is the spread of dieting.”
The moment one begins to deprive oneself, physically or psychologically, the body and the mind, faced with the specter of starvation, are programmed to find ingenious metabolic strategies for restoring the previous condition. They use food more efficiently and consume it more compulsively in order to make even more fat, which is more difficult to lose.
Some people actually lose weight when they stop dieting. But giving up diets may, in the end, be even harder for many people than restricting their food. To decide to stop dieting ends the illusion that you are in control of your weight. It may mean, as well, deciding to abandon the dream of ever being thin, all hope of one day looking the way you thought you wanted to look, rather than the way you are. It’s easy, in our society, to love thin, but hard to achieve it. It’s easy to be fat today, but hard to love it. Rather than working to get thin we should all be working to love fat. Not in order to become more obese, although that may happen, but because fait is what most of us are becoming anyway. But at the end of this century, loving fat is even harder than dieting.
(pages 16-17)
It is one of the assumptions of this book that fat is feminine and hence beautiful. But it’s important to distinguish fat’s beauty from the misguided idea or perverse ideal of what we normally think of as feminine beauty. … It is invented, manufactured, sustained, and promoted by a vast industrial, ideological system, in order to obscure the reality of our bodies. The myth is designed to oppress and exploit us all, but mostly women, with the notion that we can never be too thin. …
Fat may be bad for some things, but there’s lots of evidence that a fair amount of it is good for bearing children. There’s no doubt that women who starve themselves eventually cease to menstruate and that fat may be necessary, particularly in uncertain times, to protect the growing fetus from any interruption of nourishment suffered by the scavenging adult. … Given all the genetic, all the biological reasons that must contribute to our being fat, and that may even explain why we are getting fatter, it seems, on the surface, strange that our current ideal of beauty, the anorexically thin, is so at odds with our biological requirements. It may be the paradox of style. For most of history, fat was a beneficent, productive, life-sustaining substance—a guarantee against the permanent dangers of scarcity, a spur to female fertility, an insulation against the cold winds that blow into primitive houses, a sign of abundance, a token of good cheer. Fat has throughout most of history been infinitely preferred to thin. So modern style decrees that thin is in.
(pages 38-39)
Shapeliness rather than fat may be the crucial factor determining sexual desirability; the smaller the waist in relation to the hip, the more desirable a woman is seen to be. Professor Devendra Singh at the University of Texas believes that this may be the most powerful sexual trigger of all, and what strengthens her theory is the fact that this ratio has recently been recognized as a key indicator of health.
(page 44)
… You have to entertain the real possibility that to change the beauty myth would require something like a political decision, a collective struggle, maybe even civil disobedience to resist the power of the idols of thin. … Once the myth of beauty was fat. Now it’s thin. It could certainly change again. It’s not easy to change your image of what is beautiful and desirable, especially if those images have been programmed by your personal history, reinforced by the social environment, and manipulated by the cynical media.
(page 63)
My position is this. Even if fat is unhealthy, which it is and it isn’t, for the vast majority of people, it’s probably healthier than the alternative. The alternative is dieting, compulsive exercise, hyper-vegetarianism, diet pills. My opinions start from the a priori premise that administering any powerful drugs to a large population over a long period of time is not good for public health.
(page 149-150)
… It’s not the money the rich are afraid to spend, but calories, which are worth more than money. Calories have become more precious than money because money for these people is all but unlimited, whereas none of them dying to be thin has calories to spare. …dieting is the most perfected for of consumption under conditions of advanced capitalism, ensuring the greatest amount of business for everyone all around.
(page 194)
Some quotes from the book that I found striking:
There is abundant evidence to suggest that attempts to curb your appetite voluntarily encourage the body to make fat, incite the impulse to binge, and are the precipitating cause of many eating disorders. Only four people out of a hundred continue, after dieting, to keep their weight down: 76 percent of all dieters are fatter after three years than they were before they began, and 95 percent after five years. Eating disorders have recently been reported to be twice as widespread as had been thought, and the incidence is steadily rising. According to the Times, “the single most likely culprit for the rising rate of…eating disorders, experts say, is the spread of dieting.”
The moment one begins to deprive oneself, physically or psychologically, the body and the mind, faced with the specter of starvation, are programmed to find ingenious metabolic strategies for restoring the previous condition. They use food more efficiently and consume it more compulsively in order to make even more fat, which is more difficult to lose.
Some people actually lose weight when they stop dieting. But giving up diets may, in the end, be even harder for many people than restricting their food. To decide to stop dieting ends the illusion that you are in control of your weight. It may mean, as well, deciding to abandon the dream of ever being thin, all hope of one day looking the way you thought you wanted to look, rather than the way you are. It’s easy, in our society, to love thin, but hard to achieve it. It’s easy to be fat today, but hard to love it. Rather than working to get thin we should all be working to love fat. Not in order to become more obese, although that may happen, but because fait is what most of us are becoming anyway. But at the end of this century, loving fat is even harder than dieting.
(pages 16-17)
It is one of the assumptions of this book that fat is feminine and hence beautiful. But it’s important to distinguish fat’s beauty from the misguided idea or perverse ideal of what we normally think of as feminine beauty. … It is invented, manufactured, sustained, and promoted by a vast industrial, ideological system, in order to obscure the reality of our bodies. The myth is designed to oppress and exploit us all, but mostly women, with the notion that we can never be too thin. …
Fat may be bad for some things, but there’s lots of evidence that a fair amount of it is good for bearing children. There’s no doubt that women who starve themselves eventually cease to menstruate and that fat may be necessary, particularly in uncertain times, to protect the growing fetus from any interruption of nourishment suffered by the scavenging adult. … Given all the genetic, all the biological reasons that must contribute to our being fat, and that may even explain why we are getting fatter, it seems, on the surface, strange that our current ideal of beauty, the anorexically thin, is so at odds with our biological requirements. It may be the paradox of style. For most of history, fat was a beneficent, productive, life-sustaining substance—a guarantee against the permanent dangers of scarcity, a spur to female fertility, an insulation against the cold winds that blow into primitive houses, a sign of abundance, a token of good cheer. Fat has throughout most of history been infinitely preferred to thin. So modern style decrees that thin is in.
(pages 38-39)
Shapeliness rather than fat may be the crucial factor determining sexual desirability; the smaller the waist in relation to the hip, the more desirable a woman is seen to be. Professor Devendra Singh at the University of Texas believes that this may be the most powerful sexual trigger of all, and what strengthens her theory is the fact that this ratio has recently been recognized as a key indicator of health.
(page 44)
… You have to entertain the real possibility that to change the beauty myth would require something like a political decision, a collective struggle, maybe even civil disobedience to resist the power of the idols of thin. … Once the myth of beauty was fat. Now it’s thin. It could certainly change again. It’s not easy to change your image of what is beautiful and desirable, especially if those images have been programmed by your personal history, reinforced by the social environment, and manipulated by the cynical media.
(page 63)
My position is this. Even if fat is unhealthy, which it is and it isn’t, for the vast majority of people, it’s probably healthier than the alternative. The alternative is dieting, compulsive exercise, hyper-vegetarianism, diet pills. My opinions start from the a priori premise that administering any powerful drugs to a large population over a long period of time is not good for public health.
(page 149-150)
… It’s not the money the rich are afraid to spend, but calories, which are worth more than money. Calories have become more precious than money because money for these people is all but unlimited, whereas none of them dying to be thin has calories to spare. …dieting is the most perfected for of consumption under conditions of advanced capitalism, ensuring the greatest amount of business for everyone all around.
(page 194)
December 9, 2018
I think I would have liked this book better if I read it during the time period in which it was written or before I’ve read other material on anti diet and fat acceptance. The book did offer some bits of information I didn’t know like presidential eating habits or specific doctors with a not so hidden agenda. However, it mostly reinforced what I already know or felt which is fat is fine and diets don’t work.
December 19, 2013
Klein writes very well, but he seems deliberately contrarian to the point of exaggeration. He has a good point: American culture stigmatizes fat beyond reason and it would be healthier live with more tolerance of fat in people and within our own diets, however he is equally extreme with his arguments and lost me along the way.
July 10, 2009
fuck yes. i love this total re-think of our fattist food culture. particularly cos klein is always so joyous and so inquisitive. made me love my loving to eat and gave me the theoretical gumption to to.
January 10, 2013
A re-read from 2001, though most of the material is from the late 1990s. Much of the mantra and discussion about fat-phobia is still relevant, so if you haven't read it, it's worth reading. I just wish the fat utopia happened after the Millennium. Alas!
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews