Consumed: How We Learned to Hate Our Bodies

Consumed: How We Learned to Hate Our Bodies

By JN Nartey

We live in an age obsessed with food, fitness, beauty, and health—yet more disconnected from our bodies than ever before.

In Consumed, JN Nartey exposes the quiet cultural war waged against the human body. What was once instinctive and life-sustaining has been transformed into anxiety, discipline, and self-surveillance. Eating has become a moral test. Bodies have become projects. Beauty has become a demand rather than an expression.

This book explores how calorie counting, chronic dieting, wellness perfectionism, and unrealistic beauty ideals have taught millions of people to distrust their hunger, police their appearance, and see their bodies as inefficient, defective, or in need of constant correction. What often passes as "self-improvement" is revealed as a deeply normalised form of self-rejection—one that fuels shame, comparison, disordered eating, and lifelong dissatisfaction.

Drawing on psychology, culture, philosophy, and lived human experience, Consumed examines the industries and belief systems that profit from body insecurity, the gendered and social pressures that shape our relationship with food and appearance, and the profound psychological, physical, and spiritual costs of living at war with oneself.

More than a critique, Consumed is an invitation—to return to the body as a place of intelligence, dignity, and care; to reclaim eating as nourishment and joy; and to imagine a culture in which beauty is no longer built on self-hatred.

This is a book for anyone who has ever felt at odds with their body—and wondered how it ever came to be this way.