A study that explores patients’ perspectives on a life-altering surgery
Bariatric surgery rates around the world have increased exponentially over the past decade. In Extreme Weight Loss, anthropologists Sarah Trainer, Alexandra Brewis, and Amber Wutich provide us with an inside look at how patients experience this medical procedure, as well as its far-reaching and complex personal implications.
Drawing on patient interviews, survey data, and more, Trainer, Brewis, and Wutich explore why people decide to undergo bariatric surgery, and how that decision transforms their lives. They show, in painstaking detail, how the journey to weight loss is can be at once painful and liberating, dispiriting and self-affirming.
Extreme Weight Loss explores questions about which bodies are treated as though they belong in modern societies, and which bodies are treated as unwanted. It considers how people challenge and manage these unfair standards, illuminating what it means to be large-bodied in America’s diet-obsessed culture.

"Trainer, Brewis, and Wutich offer an effective and affecting ethnographic account of what it means to undergo extreme weight loss. The analysis is presented thematically, describing the medicalization of obesity, the stigmatization of fat bodies, and the restrictions on daily life that surgery imposes on patients." - Medical Anthropology Quarterly

"Extreme Weight Loss is a good read, providing important ethnographic insight into the world of a US bariatric surgery clinic and people's experience of passing through it. Readers from many backgrounds will learn about the material realities of fatness and weight loss surgery, as well as the reconfiguration of identity that is involved in the process of trying to conform to societal norms." - Sociology of Health and Illness

"The book is a valuable addition to the rich body of writing on the complex status of body weight in human societies. The study features as a part of the authors Sarah Trainer’s, Alexandra Brewis’ and Amber Wutich’s sustained research engagement with the themes of social inequality, obesity, and stigma in the context of global public health." - Anthropology Book Forum