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A personal and cultural look at the dark underbelly of Western beauty standards and the lethal culture of disordered eating they've wrought. "Electric with insight, and suffused with a strange, stubborn tenderness - a deep regard for what intimacy, hope, and resistance might look like in a world where women are taught to devote their lives to destroying themselves." - Leslie Jamison, author of The Recovering. In Dead Weight, Emmeline Clein tells the story of her own disordered eating alongside, and through, other women from history, pop culture and the girls she's known and loved. Tracing the medical and cultural history of anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder, and orthorexia, Clein investigates the economic conditions underpinning our eating disorder epidemic, and illuminates the ways racism and today's feminism have been complicit in propping up the thin ideal.