Anti-Diet Christy Harrison Book Cover

Anti-Diet: A Complete and Honest Book Review

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Anti-Diet by Christy Harrison is a book dedicated to showing readers they’re being manipulated and how to take back their power. It shines a light on the unjustified beliefs that society has about larger-bodied people and aims to crush the stigma surrounding fat. This review has everything you need to decide if it’s the right book for you.

A Book Exposing Diet Culture

What’s truly amazing about this book, is the amount of information it holds. With each chapter, you learn something new and thought-provoking. Before posting this review, I had to cut out a bunch of the notes I took. With this in mind, here’s a “quick” overview of the book.

The Life Thief

In Anti-Diet, Christy deeply examines how people are losing their lives to dieting. Much like a religion, it can become tied to our beliefs and identity. If the obsession with what we eat becomes too great, we begin to question our morals, harming our mental health in the process.

Food fixations keep people from having normal relationships and enjoying a healthy life. Happy experiences and connections are put off because of it. For some, it leads to certain eating disorders like orthorexia. Time is wasted each day by checking foods, counting calories, researching, trying on different clothes, the list goes on.

The Part Society Plays

Anti-Diet gives us an in-depth look at how the dieting industry works, and how it’s reshaped itself over more than a century. It explains how intentional weight loss and restriction over the last 150 years hasn’t led to a smaller or healthier population. Rather, food restriction makes us unhealthy in many ways.

The book uncovers how racism and sexism led to a belief that thin equals superior. It talks about the thought of thinness being “pure” and “ideal” and how it’s been used to keep minorities oppressed.

Christy suggests that certain diets are used to show morality or greatness. That appearing healthier than your neighbor is as important as appearing richer than them. It explains healthism, the notion that healthy and thin people are more valuable and deserve more respect. This ties into fatphobia and cultural biases used to stigmatize larger people.

Also, the reader is shown how they’re being manipulated into believing that weight loss services are worth the insane price tag. Or, how they’re supporting diet culture without even buying anything. Moreover, the diet industry manages to stay relevant by constantly adapting and using predatory behaviors. Anti-Diet gives you the knowledge to protect yourself from it.

"In our society at this moment in history, it’s basically impossible not to fall into diet culture’s clutches at some point." -Christy Harrison, Anti-Diet Click To Tweet

A Diet in Disguise

In recent years, “Diet” has become a dirty word. Although most people think they’re not dieting, the diet industry has now rebranded itself as “wellness”. Think detoxes, clean eating, keto; these are all restrictive eating with the intent of making ourselves healthier. Christy shows us why these “wellness” diets fail, and why we’re better off without them.

She also gives readers the knowledge to identify when something is a diet in disguise. Some, like clean eating, have no clear definition making it harder to figure out. Detailed experiences are shared by people who sold weight-loss programs and stopped because of the guilt they felt.

The Ugly Side of Diet Culture

The book goes over what people typically experience after they lose significant weight through dieting. How diets make us fatter and less healthy over time. It teaches about the negative effects of weight cycling, deprivation of certain foods, and how dieting leads to eating disorders.

In short, you restrict food to become healthy but end up damaging your health instead. Christy shares with the reader that deprivation is what makes us want to overeat. Any restriction to lose weight is likely to kick in survival impulses strong enough to drive us insane. But diet culture would have us believe it’s about us lacking willpower.

Woman Overwhelmed By Diets Anti-Diet Review

Identifying Misleading Information

The book describes how biased and inaccurate diet studies can be. It shares the many ways that research can be altered or skewed to benefit whoever is paying for the studies. Also, research doesn’t cover holistic health and may overlook things that better explain the results.

To add to the misinformation, people everywhere share advice with no solid science backing it up. People even self-diagnose food intolerances without testing and deny tests when they come back negative. Journalists share information they never read the actual research for.

Christy explains conflicting evidence towards whether being overweight is less healthy or not. Doctors may sustain certain weight stigmas while practicing, and treat larger patients differently than smaller patients with the same symptoms. She also lists the many reasons that stigmas themselves are making larger-bodied people less healthy.

The Anti-Diet

Part 2 of the book teaches the reader how to give up dieting and enjoy life without restriction. It teaches intuitive eating, which involves trusting our bodies to know what food it needs and honoring its cravings. It gives the information needed to stop demonizing certain foods, feel full, and take back your power from diet culture.

Christy explains everything you’ll go through when giving up dieting for good. She describes the “honeymoon phase” when you start eating normally again, and when it ends. Also, she teaches you how to get through the shame felt when you stop dieting, and what you can do to support your recovery.

Finally, Anti-Diet covers the many benefits of giving up dieting. You’ll learn about food freedom, and what that means for mental, physical, and emotional health. The book talks about Health at Every Size (HAES), a movement aimed to teach people how to embrace their size, and take care of themselves regardless of it.

About Christy Harrison

While Christy Harrison didn’t worry too much about her weight growing up, she started putting on pounds in her 20s. This led her to start dieting, which turned into bulimia and an obsession with food.

Ironically, she became a journalist and a food writer while still suffering from disordered eating. Her writing was praised, which she says is one way that diet culture can continue to exist. People were complimenting her articles which claimed restrictive dieting was the gateway to health.

Eventually, she returned to school and became a licensed dietician. Her disordered eating continued until she began studying intuitive eating and food politics. This led her to write Anti-Diet.

Christy is currently living in New York.

What Was Helpful in Anti-Diet?

Firstly, the amount of quality information given in this book is amazing. Christy Harrison gives studies and examples for every topic she touches on. I never felt the need to question anything she was saying or do any further research to understand what the point of the chapter was. This helped me stay focused and engaged while reading through.

Christy never makes you feel silly for the choices that you’ve made regarding dieting or how you may feel about your body. Rather, she’s compassionate to the reader. She aims to inform them that they’ve fallen victim to a greedy industry that doesn’t care about their health.

Also, she gives real-life examples for much of her writing, including interviews with people and detailed accounts of their experiences. It’s easy to make a connection between their lives and your own. This helps the reader see the reality of the conditioning they’ve been given from a young age. In reality, the book is a major eye-opener.

Lastly, anyone looking to broaden their horizons will greatly appreciate Anti-Diet. The book is saturated with useful information about health, history, and society. Whether you diet or not, this book will teach you something new.

What’s Not Helpful in Anti-Diet?

In a way, Anti-Diet dismisses the fact that having too much fat on the body can harm it. The book is totally compassionate and inclusive, which is great, but states many times that being bigger does not harm one’s health. Although she gives many studies to back her claim, readers may still find this hard to believe.

Many of her arguments convince the reader of conspiracies by white men and insurance companies. This can make readers paranoid, distrustful, and angry. Though, this is likely intentional.

Also, after reading this book you’re going to see diet culture everywhere. You may start to notice the disordered eating habits of your friends and family. It’s a bit saddening to see their struggles, but you will have the knowledge to help them.

Who can Benefit from Reading Anti-Diet?

  • Anyone with an eating disorder who’s looking for guidance. But this advice is only good if you are not at risk of hurting yourself. If so, please seek professional help.
  • Whoever has an obsession with food and comparison disrupting their life.
  • People sensitive to words like obese and fat. “Smaller-bodied” and “larger-bodied” are used to have a more neutral description.
  • Anybody interested in learning how society developed its negative views on body size.
  • Somebody who wants to give up dieting and learn to respect their body.
  • Someone looking for more information to back up their Health at Every Size debate.
  • Anyone who needs proof that they’re not crazy, society’s crappy beliefs are.

Would I Recommend the Book?

While I disliked the outrage I felt while reading Anti-Diet, I was certainly glad I read it. I feel like my eyes are open for the first time regarding the weight loss and diet industry. I can now protect myself from the subtle messages around me telling me I should hate my body. It’s an empowering feeling.

Now, I am more empathetic and compassionate towards people living in larger bodies. I know that they’re not worth any less than someone who is smaller or who eats a certain way. Their circumstances could be very different from my own. Overall, I feel like I’m a better, more understanding person.

Resources

If you haven’t read Anti-Diet yet, I wholly recommend it. I chose to listen to the audiobook. Christy herself narrates it, which puts genuine emotion into the words you’re hearing.

Click below for quick links to the book on Amazon!

Have you read Anti-Diet? Did you enjoy it like me? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

That’s it for now everyone. If you’ve found some value in this post, please share it to inspire others too! Thanks!

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26 thoughts on “Anti-Diet: A Complete and Honest Book Review”

  1. Sounds like a good book, I bet the author’s MPH gives her a lot of perspective on health & society. It gets interesting watching how health fads are used to sell more things at grocery stores. Right now I’d say the hot new thing I see plastered on every other product is “plant-based.” I wish people really would educate themselves on health more than just relying on advertising & packaging.

    1. I see a lot of misleading things on packaging too! Even the colors chosen are used to make people feel like something is healthy. It’s so manipulative.

        1. Oh yeah. Green and brown packaging makes things look healthier. But if you compare with other products, they could be the same or worse.

  2. I haven’t read the book but I agree on how toxic the dieting culture can be. It promotes discrimination and can damage someone’s body image, self-esteem, and their mental health. I personally prefer intuitive/mindful eating. It is not restrictive and it helps to rebuild a healthy relationship with food.

    1. This is how I’m learning how to eat as well. It’s nice to finally stop restricting the foods I love

  3. Ang, thanks for highlighting this book. It is game of “yo-yo diet” fads. I use that term carefully, as people who doe these diets yo-yo up and down with their weight. To me, the best way to lose weight has been doing something that is “sustainable.” Portion control is a good tool. So, is reducing carbs and fried foods. Avoiding taking a bag of anything to the couch, put a serving in a bowl. And, just mix in some routine light work outs each day for ten or fifteen minutes in the morning. Most importantly, ditch the books. Keith

  4. I think this book could really help me. I feel passionate about learning about diet culture and this post is so insightful! Restricting foods is a habit that I find so easy to slip back into and it’s a habit I really want to break!

    1. I’m bad wiith overrestriction too. I’ve had trouble with eating disorders and this book made me see a lot of what caused them.

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