I wanted to like this book so much. After looking into it, there really isn't very many books tackling the topic. My husband and I read it together and found it useful more for the fact that we did not like much of it. It created some great conversations and shined light on how inundated our children our by diet culture and the culture of thin is "good" fat is "lazy, bad." It helped us openly talk about our own histories and biases and plan for how we can work through all this with our own kids. The booked lacked in solid science, felt very anectodical, and practical advice and has us on the lookout for better books around the topic.

Valuable book for parents

An interesting look into diet culture and the harmful effects it has on those within it. Also had a lot of great information on how to navigate it with children growing up surrounded by it.

This is an important book: 'll be thinking about it for a long time. the three big takeaways I get from this respected journalist and researcher are:
1. There is no scientific consensus that moderately overweight people have adverse health consequences; actually the opposite is often true. You can be overweight and be perfectly healthy.
2. Hosts of studies show that dieting most often results in increased weight gain in the end: dieting seems to trigger metabolic changes that kick in "whenever our bodies' weight drops below the range researchers call our "set point" or the place where our bodies are genetically programmed to function best." The multi-billion dollar diet industry has not changed this.
3. It appears that scientists don't know why some people are fat and others are thin, but people have come in all shapes and sizes since time began. How much happier we'd all be if we could simply accept that.

This woman is on to something!

This is a phenomenal book. It strikes the perfect balance between both offering thoroughly researched factual information and also providing practical suggestions for parents and caregivers trying to relate to food in a different way with children.

Once you know diets don’t work and can have many detrimental long term effects on children and adults and that you want to divest yourself from the pressure of diet culture, it can feel like you’re adrift on an ice float. You know what NOT to do, but not much about what approach to take given what you’ve learned about bodies and the naturally occurring range of shapes and sizes. Most of the advice out there is based on bad science and punishing people for being fat. Virginia’s book is the perfect companion for divesting ourselves of diet culture and plotting a new course for our children and future generations. I’m working hard to break the generational patterns of following dangerous misinformation that had me put on a diet in middle school, and I’m so grateful to have this as a reference going forward.