Body of Truth Quotes

“Like many women who've dieted on and off for years, I was scared to stop counting Weight Watchers points or calories or fat grams or whatever I was counting at any given moment, afraid that if I stopped restraining myself, my hunger would be insatiable. I had to learn to trust my own appetite, and man, was that scary. I mean, if there were no rules, what would stop me from just eating and eating and eating until I weighed five hundred pounds? How would I know when to stop eating the foods I loved if there was no one to tell me to stop?”
― Harriet Brown, Body Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight--And What We Can Do about It

“How many evenings did I stand in the middle of grocery store aisle, paralyzed with fear and indecision? It's not just the time I regret; it's the loss of who I might have been if I wasn't so consumed. It's who I might have loved, how I might have lived, what I might have accomplished. I might have been a force to be reckoned with.”
― Harriet Brown, Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight--and What We Can Do about It

“Fat or thin, the entire American population has internalized this idea about fat being terrible,” Averill told me. “They’re overexercising and undereating and living in a constant state of fear and panic about this horrible, hateful thing we must avoid at all costs. So if they allow someone else to say ‘It’s OK to be fat and you should stop being mean to fat people,’ their entire life of self-torture is a waste.”
― Harriet Brown, Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight—and What We Can Do about It

“to knock your own body for being too fat is to show your support for the notion that fat is bad, unattractive, unhealthy, unacceptable. Even if the reassurances you get from others are well intentioned, they’re still coming from the perspective that fat is not OK.”
― Harriet Brown, Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight—and What We Can Do about It

“Dieting and the fear of food have made us fatter, sicker, more depressed and more obsessed.”
― Harriet Brown, Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight—and What We Can Do about It

“The more we enjoy our food, the more efficiently our bodies make use of its nutrients. In a now-classic experiment done in the 1970s, researchers in Thailand and Sweden fed volunteers from each country identical spicy Thai meals, then measured how much iron each volunteer had absorbed from the meal. The Thai volunteers absorbed 50 percent more iron from the meal than the Swedes; the researchers hypothesized that being familiar with the food served, and liking it, helped the Thai women digest it more effectively. In the next phase of the study, researchers took the same meal, mushed it into paste, and fed it to the volunteers again. This time the Thai women absorbed a lot less of the iron than they had before, presumably because mush is not quite as appetizing as real food.14”
― Harriet Brown, Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight—and What We Can Do about It

“What some call health, if purchased by perpetual anxiety about diet, isn’t much better than tedious disease.” —Alexander Pope, eighteenth-century English poet”
― Harriet Brown, Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight—and What We Can Do about It

“being overweight does not increase a person’s risk of dying prematurely, and being mildly obese increases it only slightly.”
― Harriet Brown, Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight—and What We Can Do about It

“Weight dissatisfaction may actually discourage people from engaging in healthy behaviors,”
― Harriet Brown, Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight—and What We Can Do about It

“Obviously we’re not in prison; we’re free to turn off the TV and step away from the smartphone. But to do that is to cut ourselves off. Our need to belong, to be part of our community, makes us vulnerable to the power of our culture’s ideals. Our need to compare ourselves to others, which in turn helps us survive and thrive in a hostile world,32 makes us susceptible to anxiety about every aspect of our selves, from how we look to how much money we make to how many friends we have.”
― Harriet Brown, Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight—and What We Can Do about It

“If tomorrow, women woke up and decided they really liked their bodies, just think how many industries would go out of business.”
― Harriet Brown, Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight—and What We Can Do about It

“My mom was strict about what food we could eat and what we couldn’t. Part of this was about money and part of it was about staying thin. When my sister would reach for seconds my mom would say, “Why don’t you just slap that directly on your ass?”
― Harriet Brown, Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight—and What We Can Do about It

“Satter believes we not only can give ourselves permission to enjoy food but that we should. That it’s a necessary part of learning to take care of yourself with food. Because if you’re not enjoying what you eat, you’re consuming it out of duty or responsibility or to deprive yourself of pleasure. And that’s a very different process than eating to sustain and nourish yourself.”
― Harriet Brown, Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight—and What We Can Do about It

“I’m sure I never criticized either of my daughter’s bodies, partly because I never felt critical of them. But I do remember standing in front of the mirror and criticizing my body when they were young, even as I reassured them they were beautiful just the way they were. At the time I had no idea that in trash-talking my own body I was giving them a far more potent message than all the compliments in the world. That’s still one of my biggest parenting regrets.”
― Harriet Brown, Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight—and What We Can Do about It

“Unless you lock yourself in a room, have minimal food brought to you, don’t watch TV, and don’t have access to anything outside, you’ll be surrounded by food cues,” she explains. “Which ultimately take their toll. As soon as you can get food, you eat more and gain back everything and then some.”
― Harriet Brown, Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight—and What We Can Do about It

“But two more pregnancies, a miscarriage, and a severe postpartum depression treated with antidepressants left me at my heaviest ever. And each time I gained another pound, the voice in my head got a little nastier: You’re worthless and lazy and stupid. You’re out of control. You’re the ugliest woman in the room, the neighborhood, the world.”
― Harriet Brown, Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight—and What We Can Do about It

“One of the underlying assumptions about health is that if only we do everything right, we’ll be healthy.”
― Harriet Brown, Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight—and What We Can Do about It

“Gard and Wright also point out that we are becoming a society obsessed by risk, and by the fantasy that we have nearly infinite power to control it. “Fundamental to such notions is that by naming the risk it can be managed—that is, uncertainty can be reduced—and by understanding the lines of causality, one can act rationally to avoid it,” they write. If that were true, we’d all live forever. Or at least a lot longer.”
― Harriet Brown, Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight—and What We Can Do about It

“Over the years I’ve seen my body as an enemy to be conquered, deprived, and beaten into submission—that is, into the smallest possible shape and size. Occasionally I felt proud of its strength and curviness. But more often I saw it as a symbol of my personal weakness and shame, an outward manifestation of my inadequacies and failures. Catching sight of myself in a mirror—an experience I tried to avoid—could send me into a dark place for hours. I spent years wallowing in self-hatred because of the size of my thighs. My weight went up and down over those decades, from the low side of “normal” to mildly obese, but my level of despair and self-loathing stayed sky-high.”
― Harriet Brown, Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight—and What We Can Do about It

“How can you feel good about your essential self when you hate what contains it?”
― Harriet Brown, Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight—and What We Can Do about It

“Guisinger’s theory is that people with the anorexic adaptation could lead a tribe to food when everyone else was too weak to think clearly or want to move. Once they found new food sources and regained strength, she says, the group would draw the person with anorexia back into health through the social routines of eating3—by including her, encouraging her, and supporting her eating until she’d regained weight and strength.”
― Harriet Brown, Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight—and What We Can Do about It

“Study after study has shown that overweight and moderately obese patients with certain chronic ailments live longer and do better than normal-weight patients with the same health problems. And many of those problems are the ones most often blamed on obesity, like heart disease, stroke, and diabetes.”
― Harriet Brown, Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight—and What We Can Do about It

“the risk ratio for heart disease in people who are overweight or obese is between 1.1 and 2, meaning their risk of developing heart disease is the same as or only slightly higher than the risk for people with “normal” BMIs.”
― Harriet Brown, Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight—and What We Can Do about It

“We also live with rising levels of chemical contaminants, and researchers are finding more and clearer correlations between exposure to those contaminants, levels of obesity, and levels of diabetes. The main culprits are the so-called persistent organic pollutants—pesticides, PCBs, and other compounds that build up in our food, water, and bodies2—and endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) like bisphenol A (also known as BPA).”
― Harriet Brown, Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight—and What We Can Do about It

“We know that for women, especially young women, time spent on social media is linked to lower self-esteem and body confidence, and higher levels of depression and loneliness.”
― Harriet Brown, Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight—and What We Can Do about It