Consumed: A Memoir

by Krista Scott-Dixon

When we meet our protagonist, she’s spoon-deep in a tub of peanut butter, trying to slather over her failed academic job, her sense of futility, and her family history.

And yet, like the peanut butter sticks to the roof of our mouths, we can’t escape our feelings, failures, nor fucked-up families. We have to swallow and digest them.

Bears! Guns! Hams thrown through walls! The best way to hide fishloaf! Learning what the hell fishloaf is!
Turd Soup! Getting high with dad! The cancer game! Explosive diarrhea! Communist sympathizers and possible Nazis!

All this and more! Consumed is a salty, chunky, gunky, spreadable, edible feed-trough of delicious, dysfunctional goodness!

- See more at: http://www.stumptuous.com/consumed-a-...

ebook

First published August 1, 2013

Reviews

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

I suspect the readers of this book are familiar with Krista Scott-Dixon's work at Stumptuous.com, or perhaps with her nutrition coaching. That, I suspect, explains the fairly mediocre reviews thus far. Because this little book isn't one of her famous rants, or a blog post, or even a straightforward narrative of eating disorder and recovery. Instead, it's a ragged, gaping, confessional poem in story form. As Scott-Dixon says herself, there is no "capital T trauma" in her story, just a thousand little unsatisfactory pieces. A complicated childhood, an unsatisfying career, aging parents. The crap we all deal with, that wears us all down. Adult women are the new battleground of disordered eating, for exactly these reasons, as we seek to reestablish control in a world that refuses to give it to us.

In the end, the books stays true to its theme: in a world of a million disappointments, there can't possibly be one true resolution, so don't expect one here.

[Kimberly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book because Krista Scott-Dixon is a top coach at Precision Nutrition. At first I struggled with it, it seemed like she was writing for her own pleasure and it was hard to follow.

Then I took a look at her blog, and I started to get what she’s doing with this book. Her blog is awesome.

She writes with a unique blend of wit, scientific knowledge, deep authenticity, and wisdom. A strong, intelligent woman writing about her (and our collective) relationship to food is a daring adventure and she’s able to make sense of a lot of what might be blurry to the rest of us; she articulates things at a level of specificity that is rare, or at least sure seems rare.

I particularly appreciated how she said that the desire for beauty and desirability is a desire for power (I’m summarizing, she says it much better with better context). This insight puts all our longings to be pretty, women’s magazines that endlessly chase beauty, and all of our obsessions with our looks into a whole new context. What if all this time what we’ve really been craving is power? And yet, that power we seek is an illusion, it’s not real. In her words: “Real power is hidden. The less you need to display it, the more you have.”