ABSTRACT
Obtaining the “ideal” body type is an obsession in contemporary American culture; this obsession is most pronounced, and has the most widespread destructive results, in American women. The ideal body type in American culture is, it need hardly be mentioned, “extremely thin [and] physically fit” (Brownell 1991, 1), although, again, standards for men have been somewhat more tolerant of body types other than the radically thin than they have been for women. All this is well-known, but it is worth noting just how radical the obsession with weight loss is. Brownell notes, in “Dieting and the Search for the Perfect Body: Where Physiology and Culture Collide,” that as of the late 1980s, Americans were spending well over thirty billion dollars a year on weight loss- related products, specifically “diet foods, programs, books, etc.” (1991, 1; see also Barinaga 1995, 475). By 1998 the figure had climbed to around fifty billion dollars a year (Kassirer and Angell 1998, 52). While this obsession with weight loss fits in well with some comments by the medical profession about, for example, obesity being the “second leading cause of preventable death in America” (Koop, quoted by Kassirer and Angell 1998, 52; see also below), the money spent “treating” obesity is rarely connected to clear health benefits, and in any event is mostly wasted from any standpoint (Kassirer and Angell 1998, 52).
