In many parts of the world and for most of human history, fatness has been positively regarded, especially for women (Gremillion, 2005). However, in the high-income, industrialized societies of Europe and North America, present-day medical standards of health and fitness, as well as present-day beauty standards, prescribe thin, fat-free bodies, particularly for women. In these societies, chronic discontent about weight and body size, as well as body shame, has been normative for women and girls for more than forty years (Rodin et al., 1984). Many women and girls in these societies have problematic relationships with food and many engage in extreme practices (such as fasting, vomiting, laxative abuse, and surgery) to manage their body weight, shape, and size.

Preoccupation with the size and shape of one's body and extreme practices of weight management are identified and treated as psychiatric disorders (e.g., anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge eating disorder) in contemporary European and North American societies. Identifying these practices as illnesses serves to privatize them; that is, it suggests that they are personal problems that are caused by pathological factors within the individual that can be fixed by person-level remedies. In contrast, feminist scholars have emphasized that women's preoccupation with the size and shape of their bodies and women's disturbed eating practices must be understood in the context of cultural expectations regarding women, ideals of femininity, and bodily appetites. Therefore, feminist scholars have explored gendered meanings of body size and gendered meanings of eating practices, appetite, self-discipline, and self-restraint.