p. 56 Uncomfortably, I asked myself: Do you have this psychological objection to these drugs because, at some level, you believe that obese people don't deserve to be healthy? This led me to confront something deeper in my psyche. If I am totally honest, at some level, I believed that by taking these drugs, I was cheating. You should get to weight loss through hard work-diet and exercise. Just being jabbed once a week is too easy. I felt slightly ashamed.
p. 93 As we have grown fatter over the past forty years, we have been sold three different tools for weight loss. The first two are offered to us explicitly, while the third is only offered implicitly. They are exercise, diet, and stigma. The recipe for weight loss, we are taught, is simple: eat less, move more, and feel bad about yourself if you don't.
p. 125 Most people taking these drugs say that it changes how they think, and seems to have a profound effect on their brains. They find that the foods they have craved, and obsessed over, suddenly seem less rewarding. The "food chatter" that dominated their thinking dies down. To many of them, it feels much more like an effect in their skulls than on their guts.
p. 166 [Eve Ensler] told me that, as a close friend, she had been worried for a long time that I had an underlying problem, and my poor diet was only a symptom of it. She said I was deeply disconnected from my own body. "I don't think you're in your body," she said. For years, "you didn't really think about what you're putting into it, because you're separate from it." All this stemmed from an underlying error I had fallen into: "You are treating your body as a thing – a thing that's separate from you... Your whole relationship to your body is: 'Get it to work. Get me to do the work I need to do. Serve me, serve me, get me forward.' It's a machine that you're pressing on. It's a machine that you're kind of exploiting, to be honest—as opposed to this precious life container we've been given that you have to really honor and nurture and treat well."
p. 176 Men are allowed a broader range of acceptable body types, from "dad bods" to "bears." When men receive pressure to change their bodies, they usually want to become more muscular – which brings its own challenges and can be taken to extremes, but isn't inherently unhealthy like starving yourself is. Women are given much less permission to find their own place in the world – they have been pressured for thousands of years to make themselves small and to suppress their desires.
p. 192 I first heard it articulated by the author Lindy West. She wrote: "Loving yourself is not antithetical to health, it is intrinsic to health. You can't take good care of a thing you hate."
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