Extreme Weight Loss

Life Before and After Bariatric Surgery

Sarah Trainer, Alexandra Brewis, Amber Wutich

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781479803958
• eBook ISBN:
  9781479879274
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

A study that explores patients' perspectives on a life-altering surgery

Bariatric surgery rates around the world have increased exponentially over the past decade. In Extreme Weight Loss, anthropologists Sarah Trainer, Alexandra Brewis, and Amber Wutich provide us with an inside look at how patients experience this medical procedure, as well as its far-reaching and complex personal implications.

Drawing on patient interviews, survey data, and more, Trainer, Brewis, and Wutich explore why people decide to undergo bariatric surgery, and how that decision transforms their lives. They show, in painstaking detail, how the journey to weight loss is can be at once painful and liberating, dispiriting and self-affirming.

Extreme Weight Loss explores questions about which bodies are treated as though they belong in modern societies, and which bodies are treated as unwanted. It considers how people challenge and manage these unfair standards, illuminating what it means to be large-bodied in America's diet-obsessed culture.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Weight as Pathology
• 2. Weight as Judgment
• 3. Weight Loss as Success
• 4. Weight, Worry, and Surveillance
• Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix A: Ethnographic Methods
• Appendix B: The Survey
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Authors