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Fat Talk

Coming of Age in Diet Culture

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Fat Talk

By: Virginia Sole-Smith
Narrated by: Virginia Sole-Smith
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About this listen

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

'A brave and radical book' - Rebecca Seal, The Observer

'Fearless and game-changing.' - Emily Oster

'Hard recommend.' - Pandora Sykes

'A must-read.' - Aubrey Gordon

'Essential.' - Laura Thomas, PhD

'Revolutionary!' - Bethany Rutter

'Pivotal.' - Anita Bhagwandas

Change the way you talk about food, weight, and self-worth, forever.

We live in a world designed to make us hate our bodies. By the time children start school, most have learned that 'fat' is bad. As they get older, many pursue thinness to survive in a society that ties their value to their size. Parents worry both about the risks of their kids fixating on unrealistic beauty standards - and about them becoming fat. Meanwhile, multibillion-dollar industries thrive on our insecurities, and the medical system pushes weight loss at almost any cost.

Talking to researchers, doctors, and activists, as well as parents and young people, Virginia Sole-Smith lays bare how diet culture has perpetuated a crisis of disordered eating and body hatred. She exposes our internalised fatphobia and shows why we need to let go of shame and start supporting young people in the bodies they have.

Fat Talk is a stirring, deeply researched, and ground-breaking book that will transform the conversation about health and size.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2023 Virginia Sole-Smith (P)2023 Bonnier Books UK
Developmental Psychology Diets, Nutrition & Healthy Eating Mental Health
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Everyone should read this book

A powerful and important book whether you have children or not. Everyone should read this book.

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Invaluable guidance for parents

Virginia’s approach and writing are both clear, evidence-based, kind and practical. A great book for parents wanting some guidance on how to navigate the issue of weight and anti-fat bias. I can see myself returning to this again and again.

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An incredible, well-researched, important book

Thoughtful and so engaging, Virginia Sole-Smith has researched and presented a book all of us need to read, not just parents but anyone who has grown up in diet culture and is navigating it now - so all of us. FAT TALK is clarifying, enlightening, disarming and empowering. A balm for the soul and a call to action in one.

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Sensitive and comprehensive read. Prompts thought and reevaluation of your own attitudes and mindsets.

Narration was good and you can tell the book was written with a lot of care in mind.

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Please Do Not Read!

Speaking as a body-positive, plus-sized dentist, I believe this book is a complete disaster, does a huge amount of damage to the cause it is trying to espouse, and makes some dangerous assertions.
On the one hand we have the egregious and deliberate misinterpretation of scientific studies based on the author’s biased selection agenda. Any study which links increased body weight to poor health outcomes is dismissed as being written from a biased understanding, or as proving only correlation not causation. The same scrutiny is then not applied to any study found to agree with the author’s point of view, which is naturally lauded and accepted whole-heartedly. This confirmation bias undermines the whole thrust of the author’s message, as without this to stand on her argument that there is no reason to be mindful of you or your children’s weight crumbles.
Some may read this and think I’m also reinforcing an anti-fat message; not so. I’m simply saying that trying to come up with an anti-scientific claim it’s okay to be fat because it doesn’t make you unhealthy is the wrong way to do it. A far better message of fat acceptance is found in Chris van Tulleken’s book Ultra Processed People, which not only examines the reasons why we as a global society are all becoming fatter on average (something this author completely handwaves as unimportant in favour of blindly accepting Western capitalism’s control over our nutritional landscape) but he also makes the excellent point that we owe no-one a healthy life. None of us asked to be put into this world; we have no duty to society to live an abstemious life. If we as rational, independent adults are fully informed about the food choices available to us and continue to pick the unhealthy options then that is just an expression of our own autonomy.
However, all this is really beside the point. Even if you disagree with everything I’ve said, even if you want to mark me down as another anti-fat biased reviewer, please listen to this: for goodness sake, please take the dental health of children seriously.
In the UK nearly a quarter of children under 5 have dental decay. Removal of rotten teeth is the single biggest reason for the administration of a general anaesthetic to a child. Dental decay and associated infections are a huge leading factor for time off of school and chronic, agonising pain. I see kids in my surgery every day needing hugely invasive and traumatic procedures due to sugar-induced disease. All this is going on in the background to an NHS dentistry access crisis.
I was bitterly disappointed to see the author only mention decay twice, again handwaving it as unimportant on both occasions. She gleefully reports how she disagreed with her child’s teacher who told her students not to eat cookies, telling her that “brushing will take care of the sugarbugs.” This is just not true. No amount of brushing will make up for a bad diet.
I can prove this isn’t an anti-fat message: it isn’t about the amount of sugar you eat but the frequency of which your teeth are exposed to the sugar. For example, give two kids the same amount of sweets and they might eat it very differently. One might down it all in the space of a minute; the other might show what diet culture calls restraint and nurse the packet all afternoon, coming back for a small amount of sweets little and often. From a dental point of view the one who stuffs their face but doesn’t keep snacking is the one who is going to have the better health.
That applies even if the gorging kid ate a much higher volume of sugar. It’s due to something called Stephan’s curve - as it takes about 15 minutes for their mouth’s environment to stabilise after being exposed to sugar, regardless of how much they have, the kid who picks at something is more likely to get decay. Ultimately, a dentist isn’t going to care if you eat three bags of sweets in one sitting; they’ll just want you to do it quickly.
The eating model that the author proposes - the Satter Division of Responsibility - and the laissez faire attitude to letting kids snack whenever they’re hungry is going to worsen the dental crisis that our society is already suffering from and harm countless children. Challenging anti-fat bias and diet culture is going to take more than an oversimplified, faulty, harmful argument.
To any prospective reader of this book: please read something else, and fight fat-phobia with better, less dangerous arguments.

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