Summary of Christy Harrison's Anti-Diet

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 Diet culture is a slippery concept. Some would argue that it doesn’t exist anymore, and that today’s average citizen of twenty-first-century Western culture is more concerned with health and wellness than thinness. #2 The history of diet culture is a long and complicated one, with many periods of ambivalence about body fatness. The Romans, for example, generally did not find thin bodies aesthetically pleasing, but they also did not have a unified institutionalized stigma against larger bodies until much later. #3 The word diet is connected to moralistic ideas about food, as it was in the Ancient Greek world. It was used to describe the special rules that applied to people depending on their constitution, and the doctors believed that anyone who didn’t follow those rules was intellectually and morally inferior. #4 Diet culture began to develop in the nineteenth century in the United States, when European Americans began to associate food with race. They believed that if they ate the wrong foods, their bodies would change shape to match the people they were colonizing.