Rating: WARTY!
From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
Subtitled "Radical Body Positivity for Girls of Color," I'm not sure this book was really radical except in the author's expression of the sentiments which have been expressed before, so this brings nothing new to the discussion other than the author's personal reminiscences. Virgie Tovar sounds like she might be a fun person to know and to hang with, but the book has the habit of coming off as strident and preachy at times. It was very outspoken and opinionated and while there's nothing wrong per se with that, and even though I sincerely support the book's larger aims, in the end I couldn't bring myself in good faith to commend this as a worthy read because it contains a little bit too much of anecdote as opposed to hard hitting facts, and I felt that this often undermined the author's arguments. It also has some misleading information.
The book assumes a specific audience, so it's like I wasn't invited to read it, and while I understand that it's important to target your readers, it felt weird to me to read: “I was a little older than you are—about twenty-five—when I did this.” No! She's nowhere near older than I am! That wasn't a big issue. It was amusing, though! The same kind of thing happened when I read: “‘No’ wasn’t a serious part of my vocabulary until I was, like, twentyone. It totally changed my life in the best way. I’m kind of jealous that you get to learn this before I did, but I’m glad I get to be the one who tells you about it.“ Nope! But fine for her intended audience even if it felt a bit exclusionary.
One of the real problems I had with this book was that it's all about being non-judgmental, and I support that aim fully, but even as it was saying this, the book itself sounded very judgmental at times. For example, in one part I read, “Some people talk about inheritances, like a piece of property or a really nice pair of earrings or your great grandmother’s silverware or your weird auntie’s salt and pepper shaker collection.“ Isn't describing your relative as ‘Weird auntie’ judgmental? I mean based on the fact that all we're presented with in evidence is her collection of salt and pepper shakers, that doesn't strike me as anywhere near sufficient to convict her! It felt like a case of "Pot, meet Kettle!"
On that same topic, I read, “I had a really big crush on my classmate (classmate's name redacted by me - Ian)...He only liked skinny girls and he was really mean to me.” The problem with this is that we have only the author’s story here! That's not to say the author is making this up, but there's another perspective that we never get to hear. Suppose she had this crush and was making herself obnoxious about it? I'm not saying this is true, but the way this anecdote is told, it leaves the person relating it open to the accusation that perhaps the recipient of this crush may have considered that for her, 'no' didn't mean 'no', and found that only rudeness could repel her unwanted attention.
Maybe that's the case, maybe it's exactly as the author reports; more likely, it's somewhere in between - six of one and half a dozen of the other, as they say. I don't know, and this is why this goes back to what I said about the evidence offered here being personal anecdote a lot of the time. Without a larger sample, it's really hard to exclude biased reporting and it makes it difficult for the author to defend herself against an accusation that she has a personal gripe - which still would be valid, but which would also serves to undermine her making a larger case.
As to misinformation? At one point the author writes: "I didn’t know about all the research that says that skipping meals is bad for people.” Yet nowhere is 'all the research' cited or referenced. Again, we have personal anecdote. I would have agreed with her if she'd said irregular habits (whether in regard to eating or to sleeping) are bad for you, but skipping over-indulgence is actually shown to be a good thing and is supported by research! The Harvard Health Blog is hardly a peer-reviewed science paper, but it discusses such papers and I'd take their word over anecdote. This article:
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/intermittent-fasting-surprising-update-2018062914156
supports reading I've done elsewhere which argues convincingly that intermittent - i.e. regular short fasting - is actually good for your health as long as you eat healthy meals along with it and don't go overboard with the fasting part of it. The author of this book rejects any kind of fasting out of hand, saying at one point, “‘Fasting’ is not a good idea." But we all fast when we're asleep! That's why the first meal of the day is called break-fast! It doesn't hurt to have a period of time - other than when you're sleeping! - during which you avoid food, and eat regular meals the rest of the time. It's not hard to do and it pays dividends (now that's a personal anecdote!). I'm not a Muslim, but I tend to eat very minimally if at all during the day whether it's Ramadan or not, and to eat whatever I like in the evening - but let me qualify that by saying I eat a lot of fruit and vegetables and little junk food. All I can say is that it works for me.
While I completely agree with the author that most diets - especially commercial ones and fad diets - are completely worthless - most people put the weight back on and many even gain more weight after than they had before - not all attempts to lose weight are failures. What's a guaranteed fail is dieting like the author says she did: ”When I was eighteen, I attempted a more drastic version of my sixth-grade summer diet. I decided I was going to try to eat nothing— maybe a spoonful of food a day.“ Now honestly, that’s not a diet, that’s just rank stupidity, but because you make a truly dumb decision when you're eighteen doesn't mean that all attempts to diet are stupid. It's just as judgmental to abuse people who wish to diet as it is to judge people who choose to love their body as it is.
Another example of a personal opinion injected into this work is “Food is good, not bad.“ Seriously? It honestly depends on the food. If you chose to eat nothing but cheesecake all day, every day, then yes that 'food' is bad. Choosing to eat healthily isn't ever bad, but the author assumes all food, all cravings, anything you want to put in your mouth is equal and that's dangerously misleading.
The author rightly decries the fashion circus and the cosmetic mega-business, but she conveniently ignores the agribusiness-industrial complex as you might call it, which is dedicated to selling us calories and doesn't give a damn if those calories come as sugary, fatty or salty foods, all of which are unhealthy if not controlled. In a study of almost 6,000 Coronavirus patients, ones with poor outcomes nearly always had underlying conditions, and 41% of those fatalities were at least in part because the patient was obese. Body positivity is the only smart way to go, but that doesn't mean becoming willfully blind to health considerations.
Yes, the author gets it right in that your body does need sugar. It does need carbs. It does need fat. The issue she conveniently ignores is that your body doesn't need the massive quantities of these things that we can readily get from junk food today. Here's where a good science education comes in handily, specifically the science of evolution. During most of humankind's history, it was hard for us to get these things (sugar, fat, salt) in our diet, so our bodies craved them because getting enough back then was the problem and a craving helped to satisfy that important biological need by driving us to seek out such important parts of a naturally restricted diet.
Here and now, in 2020, we do not have any problem at all getting all the sugar, fat, and salt we could ever dream of. That doesn't make it healthy to continue to crave it and eat it every chance we get. Quite the opposite. It's dangerous and unhealthy to suggest all food is equal and we ought to feel free to eat as much as we want, of whatever we want, whenever we want. It's downright irresponsible and this was the main reason why I started turning against this book even thought I would dearly have liked to support it.
The author claims that there have always been fat people, and she's right in a limited sense. What she conveniently ignores though, is that there has been a fat epidemic over the last half century or so. Obesity rates among US adults, for example, have pretty much tripled since the sixties:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3228640/
This is something new and different. It's not business as usual as the author claims, but we're in danger of complacently letting it become so. What changed is still being argued over, but the easy access to cheap calories - and bad calories - i.e. those coming from junk food promoted by food manufacturers who spend millions lobbying Congress and the senate - is one leading candidate for bringing about this change.
The author claims that “We actually all know how to eat right.” but we manifestly do not. No one is born with the inbuilt instinct of how to eat right. That's something we learn - or do not - from our parents or guardians, our family, our peers, and from movies and TV, from advertising, and increasingly from social media these days where there are paid influencers for everything, and they don't always make it clear who is paying them to promote whatever it is they're pushing. Without having a solid foundation in healthy eating from the off, we're doomed to fail at whatever it is we think we're succeeding at or embracing.
At one point the author mentions “the white standard was the one I felt more pressure to meet” But nowhere is this explicitly defined. We can divine from reading elsewhere that it's intended to be a slim pretty female, but slim pretty females come in all races. They're not just white. This is a racist comment that seems to have roots in the author's own personal history. Again it's a personal anecdote, not the result of an impartial study.
She was on more solid ground when she was talking about how much of what people of color have traditionally been subjected to has been white: the movies, TV, and so on, but that depends on what you choose to watch - and it is a choice. A person who listens to a particular type of music - say country - might conclude there's a white standard whereas someone who watches rap is forced to conclude that there's a black standard. The same goes for watching many sports, such as football or basketball in particular. The encouraging thing is that there's a bigger diversity of media now than there's ever been so it's not quite as bad as it was, and we can personally choose what to accept from it and what to reject. Anyone who truly loves their body will realize this, and take all this promotion with a pinch of whatever.
That said, there is still a long way to go. An article on Huffpost:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.huffpost.com/entry/why-do-young-girls-hate-their-bodies_b_57f4cf08e4b0ab1116a54ca9/amp)
titled "Why Do Young Girls Hate Their Bodies?“ has (or had when I copied this URL) ads showing rail-thin women modeling clothes! That’s how hypocritical we are. A better and more positive article is this one:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/health.usnews.com/health-news/blogs/eat-run/articles/2018-07-30/what-do-women-with-positive-body-images-have-that-others-dont
In terms of the general appearance of this book, the publisher once again seems to have allowed an author's book to be put directly into Amazon's crappy Kindle conversion mangle, and out came a noticeably garbled text. Fortunately it was legible for the most part if one ignores the random colorization of the text here and there, but there were issues with headers being interspersed with the text so that I read, for example, the following: “...but when she wasn’t in bed she’d be running around with uncorrected proof...” Now that's amusing, but the 'uncorrected proof' part is the page header which ought to have been removed well-before this book was ever allowed to become Kindling, which is what Amazon typically does to text.
In another section I read, “I never got more compliments from others than when I was Healthy and thin are not the same thing. starving myself.” I think 'Healthy and thin are not the same thing.' was intended as a heading, and Amazon managed to interleave it with the body of the text. That same heading was repeated right after this as well. Way to go, Amazon, you clowns! Not that Jeff Bezos, who has profited from COVID-19 to the tune of $24 billion so I read yesterday - while millions of Americans are now out of work - actually cares.
I personally have zero time for Amazon and I refuse to do business with them. I don't care that it likely costs me book sales. Someone has to take a stand and put quality over profit. Just remember that unless your text is pretty much plan vanilla, Amazon will dice and julienne it in very inventive ways, and especially if it contains images! Hopefully if this particular book is ever issued as an ebook, these problems will be fixed. This was an ARC after all.
So in conclusion, I support many of the sentiments expressed in this book. I dream of the day when perceptions, attitudes, and opinions change. I just don't feel this book will help as much as I wish it would. I felt the sentiments could have been expressed better and with a less blinkered perspective. We do need to be less judgmental and more supportive of people who are, in the author's word, 'fat', but we need to be wise in how we convey this information to people to help them wisely choose their course ahead, rather than brow-beatign them to accept 'my way' or offering them the highway as the only alternative. BTW, fatphobia isn't really a good word, although it's obviously gaining currency. The actual term is Cacomorphobia, even if it probably sounds worse! I wish the author all the best in her career but I can't support this expression of it for the reasons I've cited.
