No Fat Chicks: How Big Business Profits by Making Women Hate Their Bodies-and how to Fight B... Book

If you are among the 75 percent of American women who think they're too fat, or one of the 11 million who suffer from eating orders... know the futility of constant dieting, or the pain of beign discriminated against because of your size... feel like you don't deserve to be happy until you lose ten -- or a hundred -- pounds... have heard your kindergartner announce that she's too fat... or have seen the bumper sticker saying NO FAT CHICKS and not know whether to laugh or cry... then you'll want to read this provocative, enlightening book.

In No Fat Chicks, journalist Terry Poulton exposes the real reason so many women spend their lives chasing the mirage of a "perfect" body that only 5 percent of us can ever actually achieve: Money. Pulton once became a women's magazine cover story by losing sixty-five pounds in six months, only to regain all the weight. The experience sent her into hiding and led her to have her stomach stapled and to embark on a liquid-protein diet that destroyed her gall bladder. If finallly ended in the realization, compellingly documented in this book, that her lifelong battle with fat -- and with the crippling self-hatred that stayed with her even in her "thin periods" -- was fostered by a $50 billion industry devoted to the proposition that a woman is worthles unless she's thin.

Poulton traces the evolution of anti-fat ideology and of the businesses that profit from it. She shows how the glorification of emaciation serves the beauty, fitness, fashion, diet, food, and even the health-care industries, and how the media's vicious vilification of "fat chicks" guarantees that women will franticlly keep spending money on products that promise escape from the stigma. And she demonstrates how the cultural pressure to be thin can constrain a woman's life -- economically, sexually, psychologically, emotionally, and physically -- whether she is fat or not.

No Fat Chicks also offers new hope to weight-obsessed women, both by revealing how Poulton's own discovery of the diet industry's brainwashing process liberated her from a lifelong prison of shame and by reporting on the encouraging evolutionation of the anti-diet movement.

Passionately argued and meticulously reseached, No Fat Chicks is important, illuminating reading for any women who has ever felt like a failure for being fat.