Diet Culture

BOOKS

  • Bacon, H. (2019). Feminist theology and contemporary dieting culture: Sin, salvation and women’s weight loss narratives. Bloomsbury.
  • Jovanovski, N. (2024). Diet culture and counterculture: Self and society in the anti-diet movement. Palgrave Macmillan.
  • King, C. (2023). The body liberation project: How understanding racism and diet culture helps cultivate joy and build collective freedom. Penguin Publishing Group.
  • Morris, A. (2019). The politics of weight: Feminist dichotomies of power in dieting. Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Schwartz, H. (1986). Never satisfied: A cultural history of diets, fantasies, and fat. The Free Press.
  • Seid, R. P. (1989). Never too thin. Prentice Hall Press.
  • Sole-Smith, V. (2023). Fat talk: Parenting in the age of diet culture. Henry Holt and Company.

CHAPTERS

  • Contois, E. J. H. (2020). Marketing diets to dudes: Health, bodies, and selves on Weight Watchers. In E. J. H. Contois, Diners, dudes, and diets: How gender and power collide in food media and culture (pp. 89-116). University of North Carolina Press.
  • Germov, J., & Williams, L. (1999). Dieting women: Self-surveillance and the body panopticon. In J. Sobal & D. Maurer (Eds.), Weighty issues: Fatness and thinness as social problems (pp. 117-132). Aldine de Gruyter.
  • Griffith, R. M. (2004). “Don’t eat that”: Denial, indulgence, and exclusion in Christian diet culture. In R. M. Griffith, Born again bodies: Flesh and spirit in American Christianity (pp. 206-238). University of California Press.
  • Jovanovski, N. (2017). Femininities-lite: Diet culture, feminism and body policing. In N. Jovanovski, Digesting femininities: The feminist politics of contemporary food culture (pp. 59-101). Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Kotow, C. (2024). Interrupting embodiment: Normalizing gazes and diet culture in BBW bash spaces. In C. Kotow, The hidden lives of big beautiful women, (pp. 53-106). Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Ladyka, D., Kumar, M. M., & Docter, A. D. (2022). A brief history of fad diets and diet culture. In M. M. Kumar & A. D. Docter (Eds.), Fad diets and adolescents: A guide for clinicians, educators, coaches and trainers (pp. 9-16). Springer.
  • Lowe, M. A. (1999). From robust appetites to calorie counting: The emergence of dieting among Smith College students in the 1920s. In J. W. Leavitt (Ed.), Women and health in America, second edition (pp. 172-189). The University of Wisconsin Press.
  • Rothblum, E. D. (1994). “I’ll die for the revolution but don’t ask me not to diet”: Feminism and the continuing stigmatization of obesity. In P. Fallon, M. A. Katzman, & S. C. Wooley (Eds.), Feminist perspectives on eating disorders (pp. 53–76). The Guilford Press. 
  • Wilson, J. (2023). It isn’t diet culture, it’s white supremacy. In J. Wilson, It’s always been ours: Rewriting the story of Black women’s bodies (pp. 27-46). Hachette Books.

ARTICLES

  • Atherton, E. (2021). Moralizing hunger: Cultural fatphobia and the moral language of contemporary diet culture. Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 7(3). https://doi.org/10.5206/fpq/2021.3.10836
  • Gagliardi, N. (2018). Dieting in the long sixties: Constructing the identity of the modern American dieter. Gastronomica, 18(3), 66-81. https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2018.18.3.66
  • Jaeger, T., & Jovanovski, N. (2024). “People need to be valued because of who they are”: Self-conception and strategies of resistance in women who challenge weight-loss diet culture. Feminism & Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1177/09593535241233839
  • Jovanovski, N., & Jaeger, T. (2022). Demystifying ‘diet culture’: Exploring the meaning of diet culture in online ‘anti-diet’ feminist, fat activist, and health professional communities. Women’s Studies International Forum, 90. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2021.102558
  • Striley, K. M., & Hutchens, S. (2020). Liberation from thinness culture: Motivations for joining fat acceptance movements. Fat Studies, 9(3), 296-308. https://doi.org/10.1080/21604851.2020.1723280

DISSERTATIONS/THESES

POPULAR PRESS