Books about Thinness from Amazon.com

This book pioneered the term "father hunger" - the emptiness, and resulting food and body image disorders, experienced by women whose fathers were physically or emotionally absent. Based on ten years of further study, this second edition of Father Hunger details the origins of the syndrome and its effect on the family, with new practical solutions to help dads and daughters understand and improve their relationships. An expanded section for educators and therapists offers strategies and techniques for preventing and treating this complex problem..
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Whether they are rich or poor, tall or short, liberal or conservative, most young American women have one thing in common--they want to be thin. And they are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to get that way, even to the point of starving themselves. Why are America's women so preoccupied with weight? What has caused record numbers of young women--even before they reach their teenage years--to suffer from anorexia and bulimia? In Am I Thin Enough Yet?, Sharlene Hesse-Biber answers these questions and more, as she goes beyond traditional psychological explanations of eating disorders to level a powerful indictment against the social, political, and economic pressures women face in a weight-obsessed society.
Packed with first-hand, intimate portraits of young women from a wide variety of backgrounds, and drawing on historical accounts and current material culled from both popular and scholarly sources, Am I Thin Enough Yet? offers a provocative new way of understanding why women feel the way they do about their minds and bodies. Specifically, Hesse-Biber highlights the various ways in which American families, schools, popular culture, and the health and fitness industry all undermine young women's self-confidence as they inculcate the notions that thinness is beauty and that a woman's body is more important than her mind. The author builds her case in part by letting her subjects tell their own story, revealing in their own words how current standards of femininity lead many women to engage in eating habits that are not only self-destructive, but often akin to the obsessions and ritualistic behaviors found among members of cults. For instance, we meet Delia, a bulimic college senior who makes the startling admission that "my final affirmation of myself is how many guys look at me when I go into a bar." We even learn of six-year-olds like Lauren, already preoccupied with her weight, who considers herself "a real clod" in ballet class because she is not as thin as her peers. We are introduced to women (and men) from different cultures who themselves have acquired eating disorders in pursuit of the American standard of physical perfection. And we learn of the often tragic consequences of this obsession with thinness, as in the case of Janet, who underwent surgery to reduce her weight only to suffer from chronic illness and pain as a result. The book concludes with Hesse-Biber's prescriptions on how women can overcome their low self-image through therapy, spiritualism, and grass-root efforts to empower themselves against a society obsessed with beauty and thinness.
Am I Thin Enough Yet? brings into sharp focus the multitude of societal and psychological forces that compel American women to pursue the ideal of thinness at any cost. It will remain a benchmark work on the subject for many years to come..
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Many people consider their weight to be a personal problem, but when does body weight become a social problem? Until recently, the major public concern was whether enough food was consistently available. As food systems began to provide ample and stable amounts of food, questions about food availability were replaced with concerns about "ideal" weights and appearance. These interests were aggregated into public concerns about defining people as "too fat" and "too thin."

The chapters in this volume offer several perspectives that can be used to understand the way society deals with fatness and thinness, considering historical foundations, medical models, gendered dimensions, institutional components, and collective perspectives. These different views illustrate the multifaceted nature of obesity and eating disorders, providing examples of how a variety of social groups construct weight as a social problem..
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What is "too fat"? What is "too thin"? Interpretations of body weight vary widely across and within cultures Meeting weight expectations is a major concern for many people because failing to do so may incur dire social consequences, such as difficulty in finding a romantic partner or even in locating adequate employment. Without these social and cultural pressures, body weight would only be a health issue. While socially constructed standards of body weight may seem immutable, they are continuously re-created through social interactions that perpetuate or transform expectations about fatness and thinness.

Written by sociologists, psychologists, and nutritionists, the chapters in Interpreting Weight focus on how people construct fatness and thinness, examining different strategies used to interpret body weight, such as negotiating weight identities, reinterpreting weight, and becoming involved in weight-related organizations. Together these chapters emphasize the many ways that people actively define, construct, and enact their fatness and thinness in a variety of settings and situations..
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This book presents a combined or interdisciplinary approach for dealing with anorexia and bulimia as well as other eating disorders that affect young people and old and that have become increasingly prevalent in our appearance-obsessed culture. Celebrities parade their thinness; the Internet abounds with tips for teenage girls on how to survive on two hundred calories a day. Food disorders are a real and present issue for families and individuals..
Price: $18.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This digital document is a journal article from Body Image, published by Elsevier in . The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
Two studies examined restrained and unrestrained eaters' implicit and explicit attitudes toward fatness and thinness. Participants completed measures of implicit and explicit attitudes toward fatness and thinness (Studies 1 and 2), and a measure of the internalization of sociocultural attitudes toward thinness (Study 2). Restrained and unrestrained eaters both had strong implicit negative attitudes toward fatness, but restrained eaters had stronger negative explicit attitudes and beliefs about fatness. Explicit attitudes and beliefs were related to the degree of internalization of sociocultural attitudes, and the internalization of sociocultural attitudes partially mediated the relation between dietary restraint and explicit attitudes. These results suggest that most people are aware of societal standards regarding fatness and thinness and have developed negative implicit attitudes toward fatness, but that only some people (in particular, restrained eaters) have internalized these standards and developed negative explicit attitudes toward fatness that they endorse as personal beliefs. .
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