Too Close To The Bone Summary

In "Too "Close to the Bone": The Historical Context for Women 's Obsession with Slenderness" (167-179) and "The Man Who Couldn 't Stop Eating" (186-199), Seid and Gawande assert that we have unrealistic and destructive expectations for ourselves and others. Seid equates our current relationship with weight to a bad religion – one in which we are perpetually punished for our lack of virtue and one in which our worship and our self destruction take the same form. Our religion, according to Seid, is little more than a penance for our gluttonous goal to remain individuals in a society obsessed with slim homogeneity (178). Gawande provides a different idea, proposing that we are possibly just rolling with the punches, chasing goals as we see progress and constantly adapting to fit new ideals. The success of our …show more content…
Central to both author 's arguments are the belief in what drives people to make changes in their lives. Seid takes the view that a vast majority of our actions are determined entirely by our interactions with society. This judgement extends as far as our appearance, our responsibility, and our overall worth. Seid provides a short but revealing history of the development of our "obsession with thinness" that reveals the new ideals instilled in our advanced American culture (170-171). By providing this much-needed context, Seid effectively fuels her argument that our actions are determined widely by our peers and our culture. With inferences that television, radio, and other forms of mass media became more popular during the same time that we started to rely on body weight to tell us our place in society, it is no wonder that the entire country started to view that fatness was not acceptable. Undoubtedly, a central claim that our new ideals held were that body fat and size were a simple equation, and that exercise and certain nutritional