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Start giftingRethinking Thin
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreIn this eye-opening book, New York Times science writer Gina Kolata shows that our society's obsession with dieting and weight loss is less about keeping trim and staying healthy than about money, power, trends, and impossible ideals.
Rethinking Thin is at once an account of the place of diets in American society and a provocative critique of the weight-loss industry. Kolata's account of four determined dieters' progress through a study comparing the Atkins diet to a conventional low-calorie one becomes a broad tale of science and society, of social mores and social sanctions, and of politics and power.
Rethinking Thin asks whether words like willpower are really applicable when it comes to eating and body weight. It dramatizes what it feels like to spend a lifetime struggling with one's weight and fantasizing about finally getting thin. It tells the little-known story of the science of obesity and the history of diets and dieting—scientific and social phenomena that have made some people rich and thin and left others fat and miserable. And it offers commonsense answers to questions about weight, eating habits, and obesity, giving us a better understanding of the weight that is right for our bodies.
Gina Kolata is a science writer for the New York Times and the author of five previous books, including Ultimate Fitness, Clone, and the national bestseller Flu. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
Ellen Archer is an acclaimed audiobook narrator and winner of a coveted Audie Award for For the Love of a Dog (available from Tantor). Her recent audiobooks include the New York Times bestseller Smashed by Koren Zailckas, Unhooked by Laura Sessions Stepp, and Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami. Producers and publishers describe Ellen as versatile, warm, intimate, fresh, fun, intelligent and sultry. She easily covers the spectrum between familiar and conversational and more authoritative and aggressive deliveries.