A Biomedical and Feminist Perspective on Women's Experiences with Weight Management:

Weight concerns and dieting have become so normative for U.S. women that weight is the lens through which experience is viewed. The obsession with weight and dieting among women is considered byfeminists to be one result of the oppression by women resultingfrom questionable weight standards and weight control programs that foster a view of overweight as a sign of addiction and lack of control. Feminist critique is used to deconstruct both the literature related to weight standards and health and the research on weight loss/weight management. Feminist and ethnographic methods are used to describe successful and unsuccessful experiences with weight management of 20 Euro-American women who had participated in a 1985 weight study and agreed to be reinterviewed. Success at weight management was examinedfrom a biomedical perspective using Body Mass Index (BMI) norms and from a feminist perspective using participants' subjective definitions of success. Based upon BMI, only 8 members of the study group were defin...