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"Losing It: America's Obsession with Weight
Loss and the Industry that Feeds on It"
By Laura Fraser
Dutton, 328 pp.

"Big Fat Lies: The Truth
About Your Weight and
Your Health"
By Glenn A. Gaesser, Ph.D.
Fawcett, Columbine, 312 pp.

"Like Mother, Like
Daughter: How Women
Are Influenced by Their Mother's Relationship with Food — And How to Break
the Pattern"
By Debra Waterhouse, M.P.H., R.D.
Hyperion, 272 pp.

"True Beauty"
By Emme
Putnam, 304 pp.

"Thin is Just a Four Letter Word"
By Dee Hakala
Little, Brown, 240 pp.

"Eat Fat"
By Richard Klein
Pantheon, 248 pp.

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american dieting has it all — nearly every pathological strand in our national character twists into this banal tangle of obsessions. We're the fattest country in the world, and the most diet-prone. Our fixation on eating and body size betrays our desire for saintly self-discipline and rampant consumption, conformity and self-expression, purity and pollution, quick fixes and bootstrap striving, the craving to be rescued and the impulse to rebel. Read up on it and you'll find that nearly everything anyone has written on the subject (no matter what eating plan they advocate) fits one of two classic types of American public discourse: the declaration of independence and the evangelical personal testimony.

At the moment, a revolution is brewing; in fact, by all appearances, it's reaching a boil. On the barricades is journalist Laura Fraser, author of the new book, "Losing It: America's Obsession with Weight Loss and the Industry that Feeds on It." The buzz in the publishing world is that "Losing It" will be the next "Backlash" or "The Beauty Myth" — the kind of book read by millions of women whose vague feelings of beleaguerment come into sharp, testy focus by the time they turn the last page.

After many years spent writing about weight loss and body image for various women's and health magazines, Fraser, a former bulimic, has assembled a formidable pile of evidence demonstrating that virtually every aspect of the commercial weight loss industry is a complete fraud. Supported most convincingly by the findings of a National Institutes of Health panel convened to survey a range of scientific evidence, she argues — as most experts do today — that diets don't work. That includes crash diets outlined in bestselling books, the programs advanced by commercial diet groups and centers, doctor-supervised weight loss plans, meal substitutes and fat-free processed foods, intestinal surgery and the whole range of pills, potions and elixirs that promise to burn our fat for us.

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