Extreme Weight Loss
This book examines the complex ways in which body weight now defines many aspects of daily US life and highlights the work people are willing to do to meet difficult-to-achieve social expectations.
Abstract
With accelerating obesity and chronic disease rates worldwide, weight loss has emerged as a central concern in medical and public health efforts to improve health. Managing weight is also a very personal concern for many individuals in their effort to conform to thin social body norms in countries like the United States. Surgical weight-loss techniques (bariatric surgeries) currently are the most effective means to lose massive weight quickly, but they are not uncontroversial. This book reflects four years of ethnographic study by three anthropologists, listening to and learning from patients undergoing bariatric surgeries in a large hospital system in the US. The key theme of this book is “weight” as a physical, emotional, and social phenomenon. Extreme weight can be a trigger for prejudice, stigma, and rejection in the United States today, and the transformation of people’s bodies in the wake of surgery and weight loss is potentially physically and socially profound. By focusing on what happens before, during, and after bariatric surgery, this book examines the complex ways in which body weight now defines many aspects of daily US life. It also highlights the work people are willing to do to meet difficult-to-achieve social expectations.