How to Take Up Space (A Doctor Takes on Diet Culture and Rediscovers What It Means to Be Healthy)

A doctor explores diet culture in medicine from both sides of the stethoscope—offering a clear-eyed look at the weight prejudice embedded in every aspect of modern healthcare, and showing how patients, doctors, and health advocates are finding new, compassionate ways to care for all bodies.

Dr. Mara Gordon hears it from her patients every day: “I avoid going to the doctor because it makes me hate my body.” That’s because doctors are taught at every point in their education to focus on weight as the primary (often only) measure of a patient’s overall health, despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary. The result: Patients are shamed, not supported; doctors harm rather than heal; and no one gets any healthier.  

A primary-care doctor working in one of the poorest and most health-challenged neighborhoods in America, Dr. Gordon knows all too well how hard it is for many of her patients to get the healthcare they require. And as her own body has changed shape and size over the years, Dr. Gordon has come to see firsthand the ways in which doctors mistake the risk of disease with American’s cultural obsession with thinness. What we need, she explains, are not just trite calls for “body positivity” but true body justice. How to Take Up Space is one doctor’s radical prescription for a new kind of health care: a call for systemic change in the way we think about and care for all bodies, so we can get everyone (big or small, rich or poor) the resources they need to be healthy.