Book 2 Post 1

What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon

I chose to read this book by Aubrey Gordon because of my personal experience with body image and weight gain. Without getting into all of the details, for most of my life I’ve always thought I was overweight–although looking back on it I was crazy–but only in the last year have I truly become overweight. Weight is one of those things like money and politics that you just “aren’t supposed to talk about” so I was curious to see what this book was going to talk about. 

One of the things being talked about more as part of the consciousness raising of the last year is the treatment of fat people in the medical field. I was not surprised to learn that a lot of doctors will blame every health issue an overweight person has on their weight. Oftentimes it apparently is not the root cause as I’ve seen many stories of people who lost weight and then their doctors were willing to find the actual problem. I’m interested to learn more about the experience and treatment of overweight people, and hopeful that it will give me more compassion for my own experience.