What's Eating Us: Women, Food, and the Epidemic of Body Anxiety

"What's Eating Us?" focuses on Cole Kazdin's struggle with a persistent eating disorder that she was determined to hide from her friends and family. She binged, purged, and exercised excessively in an effort to stay slim. Ms. Kazdin is an award-winning journalist who cites scientific studies, interviews experts, and has poignant conversations with women who, like her, are anxious about their body size.

Physicians and psychologists do not agree on what causes girls and women to embrace dysfunctional eating behaviors. We do know that eating disorders take a tremendous physical and mental toll on millions of people. Furthermore, these conditions are difficult to treat, since so many patients resist seeking help. Even when they do, they show more often backslide. Sometimes, success is measured in slow progress—eating a bit more and bingeing less. It does not help that body shaming, especially on social media, is so common.

Kazdin traces her disordered eating history with brutal honesty. She received an excellent education and embarked on a fulfilling career, but for quite a while could not break free of her self-destructive habits. In this well-written and powerful work of non-fiction, Kazdin provides both factual information and heartrending anecdotes. She dismisses commercial weight-loss diets as useless and dangerous; condemns the medical profession's indifference to women of color who suffer from eating disorders; and suggests techniques that can help foster recovery. "What's Eating Us?" is an instructive, compassionate, and practical addition to the existing literature on anorexia, bulimia, and other devastating examples of disordered eating. show less

I’m not actually disappointed by this book, but it isn’t quite what I was expecting. I thought it was sociological analysis of the issues in the subtitle and while that is present, the book is much of a memoir. Let me rephrase; it’s more journalistic than sociological, and more memoir than either.

While the journalism was engaging and I appreciate how wide-ranging the interviews were, I had some difficulty empathizing with the author. I’m sure this book will help many readers, but might benefit even more readers with less explicit reference to the author’s dress size. Wouldn’t it have the same impact if we didn’t know that she was taking her size 00 suits to be tailored? And that she is still quite slim? Or maybe I’m show more just not in the right headspace of recovering from my own disordered eating to read this.

ARC provided by #NetGalley in exchange for honest review. show less