Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
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.
Sarah Trainer is the Research and Program Coordinator at Seattle University for the National Science Foundation-funded SU ADVANCE Program.
Amber Wutich is Professor of Anthropology in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University and co-author of Analyzing Qualitative Data: Systemic Approaches, Second Edition.
Alexandra Brewis is President’s Professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University and Co-Director of the Mayo Clinic-ASU Obesity Solutions. She is the author of Obesity: Cultural and Biocultural Perspectives.