"We want desperately to get this right: to have kids who love beets and kale and hummus, and who fall precisely in the middle of the body mass index at every pediatrician visit. Our kids' weight has become a measure of their current and future health and happiness, as well as our own success or failure as parents." (xvii)

"A high body weight is not, in and of itself, a disease. Kids with eating disorders are truly sick. And when a higher-weight child gets the message that their body is wrong, they become even more vulnerable to this sickness precisely because the behaviors that raise red flags when thin kids engage in them will be praised and reinforced. We've spent four decades in a public health panic about rising childhood obesity, and we've not only failed to solve that 'crisis'--we've stoked another fire." (xviii)

"For moms like Elena, it's nearly impossible to separate out her fear of judgment from her fear of fat because we've always dealt with theses as one and the same in our culture. . .. The 'war on childhood obesity' of the past forty years has normalized the notion that parents, but especially mothers, must take responsibility for their child's weight, and must prioritize that responsibility above their own relationship with their child as the ultimate expression of maternal love." (23)

"we assume that thinness equals virtue and restraint and that fatness is evidence of a body untamed. What's more, we assume that thin people are doing something (or everything) right, which gives thin people a sense of entitlement over their bodies and lifestyle choices. The entire modern fitness industry rests on the premise that thin people who work out a lot know something you don't about health. Most of them are just genetically predisposed to thinness, or to building muscle in certain ways that give them an idealize body type. But we reward them for existing--and punish fat people when they do the same." (78-9)

Division of Responsibility "assumes that every family starts from the same baseline in terms of resources and abilities. This makes DOR 'a fundamentally ableist framework,' says Hunani. 'It promises to help parents raise 'competent' eaters--bu that can be deeply triggering for kids who are labeled 'incompetnent' in so many areas of their lives.' Hunani also worries that DOR is not trauma-informed enough for th efamilies she works with. 'These kids have experienced trauma around food and will continue to experience trauma because this world doesn't work for the way their brains are wired,' she says" (120) "'Kids are interpreting all of our rules around food to figure out if they are safe or not,' Hunani says. 'And what's fine for one child will be anxiety-provoking for another.'" (120)

— Fat Talk by Virginia Sole-Smith