You have the right to remain fat

Review by Booklist Review

Tovar was a happily jiggly kid, but she eventually learned to be ashamed of her fat body. In this short personal and political manifesto, she lambastes diet culture (which she calls assisted femicide) and its slow evolution into the more benign-sounding healthy living. The so-called wellness industry preys on the internalized inferiority many women feel, and Tovar argues that this is just another way our society tries to control women's bodies by telling us that a fat person is a bad person. She also traces her journey through the very different circles of queer fat activists, who call for liberation from harmful societal demands, and the largely white, heterosexual body-positivity movement, which seeks assimilation and conforms to gender norms. She also touches on the struggles of dating straight men, like the way her more honest, fat-positive dating profile yielded far less interest than her more apologetic one. There is a lot of anger here, but there is also a lot of inspiration, and Tovar's call to action for fat women to embrace their bodies as is will resonate.--Susan Maguire Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Tovar's eye-opening debut combines personal narrative and cultural analysis to expose the forces driving "fatphobia" in America. Despite feminism's progress, "we have been living out woman-hating methods of control via our dinner plates," Tovar insists. She adds that everyone is influenced by fatphobia's pervasive reach, either through lived experience of fat-related discrimination or through the fear of future rejection. Tovar dispels myths about obesity by showing how they dovetail with larger cultural assumptions; in the chapter "Dieting, Family, Assimilation, and Bootstrapping," she explains, "Dieting maps seamlessly onto the preexisting American narrative of failure and success as individual endeavors," which she compares to her family's experiences emigrating from Mexico. In "Bros Heart Thinness: Heteromasculinity and Whiteness," Tovar asserts, "controlling women's body size is about controlling women's lives," while she recounts crushing early experiences like being called fat by her schoolmate at age four. Ultimately, dieting is not the way to freedom, Tovar concludes, self-love is. This short, accessible book packs a powerful message that will appeal to anyone eager to uncover and dispel cultural myths about beauty. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Tovar (editor, Hot & Heavy) analyzes the marriage between fat phobia and diet culture, and how women are trained to blame themselves, not society, for body shame. The author recalls her childhood, when she was called fat before she knew what the word meant. Being fat is political, she states, as demonstrated by continued societal efforts to police women's bodies. Exploring the emerging discipline of fat studies, Tovar expands on the differences between fat feminism and fat activism, and how body size connects to class, race, and gender. She excels at critiquing diet culture; describing how it matches the American narrative of failure and success as personal endeavors and how dieting and fatphobia are ideologies that rely upon inducing inferiority. Women should stop being socially rewarded for weight loss and punished for weight gain especially since either could be health related, she concludes, while admitting that ideologies of oppression are impossible to legislate; even if you regulate the behavior, the ideology remains intact. VERDICT Combining aspects of feminism and women's health, Tovar's impassioned call to action challenges Western beauty norms and how women (and girls) develop self-esteem. Ideal for YA crossover.-Stephanie Sendaula, Library Journal © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by School Library Journal Review

Author, activist, and self-proclaimed fat feminist Tovar states unapologetically that we should embrace all bodies and that our cultural obsession with dieting and thinness must stop. She recalls the time a male kindergarten classmate sneered that she was fat and how she spent her formative years trying to shrink her body. A cycle of starvation and weight gain ensued until an epiphany struck. The problem was not her body-it was that society groomed her to view it negatively. The author flexes her scholarly muscles, coherently explaining fatphobia and diet culture, holding accountable white supremacy and misogyny, and conveying a much-needed message that many teens haven't yet heard. VERDICT An important, no-nonsense voice for self-acceptance that will resonate with most readers, especially those grappling with body image issues.-Lindsay Jensen, Nashville Public Library © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A manifesto for fat rights and freedom from the tyranny of diet, exercise, and body-image conformity.Though Tovar (editor: Hot Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love Fashion, 2012) spent two decades dieting to no avail, she has since devoted her energies to the emerging fields of fat scholarship and fat activism while celebrating her "Ultra Mega Badass Fat Babe Lifestyle," which features "an anti-assimilationist framework that I [find] both familiar and wonderfully provocative." In a short book filled with flurries of sharp jabs, the author emphasizes that discrimination against the fat is as insidious and repressive as that based on race, ethnicity, or gender. "Fatphobia," writes Tovar, "is a bigoted ideology that positions fat people as inferior and as objects of hatred and derision. Fatphobia targets and scapegoats fat people, but it ends up harming all people.Because of the way fat people are positioned in our culture, people learn to fear becoming fat." If there can be a healthy balance between diet and exercise on one end and cultural tyranny on the other, the author has no interest in finding itor in recommending moderation in any form. Her more radical position is that emphasizing health and diet is just code for thin and that "diet culture is the marriage of the multi-billion-dollar diet industry (including fitness apps, over-the-counter diet pills, prescription drugs to suppress appetite, bariatric surgery, gyms, and gym clothiers) and the social and cultural atmosphere that normalizes weight control and fatphobic bigotry." Thus, campaigns against childhood obesity (a euphemism for "fat") isn't a response to a health crisis but another attempt to perpetuate the body-image tyranny.Whether or not Tovar convinces all readers that ignoring diet and exercise is the path to freedom, she offers psychological comfort to those who have been made to feel unworthy due to their body size and/or shape. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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My body used to belong to me. When I was a little girl my favorite part of the day was when we got home from errands or preschool. I would push the front door open with both small hands and run - through the living room filled with plastic-wrapped furniture, past the washer-dryer that made funny sounds that I liked, past my bedroom filled with a growing collection of Winnie the Pooh toys - into the bathroom. I would take all my clothes off as quickly as possible, shimmying out of my underwear and pants, breaking out of my shirt like it was an inconvenient membrane. I would leave the pile on the floor and then I would run back out, giggling with uncontained delight, to the kitchen where my grandmother was always cooking. I would stop at the end of the little hall, where the calico cat colored rug met the linoleum of the dining room. I would spread out my arms and legs as far as I could. And I would jiggle. My thighs and belly, my cheeks and my whole body would wobble. I would turn my head in circles. I liked that everything moved and undulated. My body was like the water in the bathtub or the water at the community pool, which I loved so much in the summer. My body was like that water, a source of relief and fun, a place I could jump into and be held. It felt good. Oh it felt so good. I remember how curious I was, and how much I loved that my body could do these incredible things. I had no sense of self-awareness, only the immediacy of pleasure. I think back on that time in my life as if it was someone else's story. It feels so far away. I feel protective of that little girl who couldn't imagine the horrible education awaiting her. Less than a year later, those jiggle-filled afternoons would disappear. I would find myself being taught by boys at school that I was unlovable and disgusting because of my fat body. I would lose sight of how magical my body was, how magical I was. I would lose the sense that my body was mine at all. All the freedom and wonder I felt became subsumed by a sharp sense that I had failed at something big. And that it was my job to fix it - to fix me. Rather than learning to trust my instincts and value myself, I learned that the size of my body was the only thing that mattered about me. Through a series of violent, culturally sanctioned events - so commonplace that women simply call them "life" - my native relationship to my body was taken from me and replaced with something foreign and alien and harmful. The relationship with my body was replaced with one toxic idea - your body is wrong. That idea would threaten my happiness and my health for nearly two decades. As much as I wish it weren't so, my story is not unique. It is, in many ways, the story of American life for women. As I was writing the introduction to this book, I got an email from a woman who told me that she was getting treated for bulimia, a disorder that disproportionately affects women and that really only exists when people live in a culture that glorifies thinness. Even though she was seeking treatment for an eating disorder that threatened her very life, she was still being cautioned against gaining "too much" weight while in recovery. Her email reminded me of the first time a woman told me she had cancer that went untreated because her doctor told her that the problem was her weight. She went in for an appointment because she was experiencing excruciating menstrual cramps and very heavy periods. She was afraid. Rather than examining her, her doctor told her that if she lost weight that everything would be fine. Had the doctor been willing to take her seriously, she could have found the lump in her uterus, but instead the it grew unchecked for another three years. And I was reminded of my own childhood and my education in body shame that sought to steal from me the most precious thing I would ever have-- the inherent magic of being alive and the vehicle through which that magic is experienced, my body. The perpetrators of these stories are body shame, fatphobia, and dieting, which hide behind the seemingly innocuous language of "self-improvement," "inspiration," and "health." In many ways, however, they are merely the secondary characteristics of a larger cultural problem, not least our country's history of unresolved racism, white supremacy, classism, and misogyny. While we have spent the last 25 years cleaning up the sexist residue in our vocabulary, we have been living out woman-hating methods of control via our dinner plates and our bathroom scales. Often not even knowing that this is what we are doing. We are giving away our lives, our time, our energy, our claim to pleasure, our desire and our power one bite a time. Submission has taken on a new face - where once there was barred access to meaningful employment and birth control, today sexism has morphed into skipped meals and too many hours spent at the gym. As Naomi Wolf wrote, dieting is "the most potent political sedative in women's history." I want to promise you that everything I tell you here is the truth, as well as I can tell it, that I have uncovered in my seven years of researching diet culture and fatphobia. I want to promise you that I don't have an agenda besides my deepest desire that reading this book will make you leave with some tools to combat this horrible assisted femicide called diet culture. I will admit I want you to get super pissed off that you have been lied to and that there are cultural forces that are actively attempting to dismantle the most precious parts of your selfhood right now, and then getting you to pay for that violent process. It is only when we stop lying to ourselves that we can stop being lied to by others. It is only when we trust our experience of the truth that we can be free. Diet culture seeks to undermine that very thing: self-trust. The compass, that reptilian and prehistoric guide that lives inside us, our greatest inheritance accumulated over generations of living on this planet. And that's why I wrote this book. I write from a place of professional and personal investment. Professionally, I am a body image expert, lecturer and author as well as a scholar in an emerging discipline called Fat Studies. Personally, I am a fatshionista, a vociferous activist, a lover of creamy pastries, a world traveler, a potty mouth, a San Francisco bohemian who loves pedicures, cheetah print, and chihuahuas who couldn't live without mimosas, huge sunglasses, tiny bathing suits, and my Hitachi Magic Wand. I am also a 250-pound woman who chose to stop dieting because I wanted to start living my life rather than continue dreaming about it. I used to believe that I was afraid of food and of being fat, but now I know that the fear was of a deeply troubled culture that would not allow me to thrive. A culture that was, in fact, invested in my degradation. It is with great urgency that I write to women directly. Whatever I tell you in the following pages is told without any agenda beside the greatest desire to see women live the life we deserve to live - the life that the culture will never grant you, the one you must take. The key to that life is the unbridling of our desire. I believe that in this culture we are taught to extinguish that desire the moment we are taught that women shouldn't be fat. I say: you have the right to be fat. Excerpted from You Have the Right to Remain Fat by Virgie Tovar All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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