January 21, 2024 — Seriously, it is not a problem if people living with obesity value their appearance. Do we really have to say this? Apparently we do. Because all too often we see a subtle bias in discourse about obesity that adds up to disrespecting people who want to look and feel their best. Physician and writer Matthew […]
December 8, 2023 — Sounds great, looks great, not helpful. That’s how we would sum up the evidence for “fitspiration” social media posts and their influence on personal health. Oxford defines this genre as “a person or thing that serves as motivation for someone to sustain or improve health and fitness.” But a recent systematic review puts a harsher […]
October 20, 2023 — Cultural norms regarding body image vary all around the world. Likewise, priorities and perspectives about health are quite variable, too. So we find it quite remarkable that a global view of the difficult issue of weight stigma emerged this week with leadership from the World Obesity Federation in Obesity Reviews. We note that, with the […]
April 9, 2023 — Hello darkness, my old friend. Welcome to the sound of silence. Social networks, conceived to connect and inform us, have evolved in a way to polarize and misinform us. Loud voices dominate public narratives on a wide range of subjects and leave us little room for the development of well-informed and nuanced views. Certainly we […]
November 11, 2022 — Are college sports having an issue with body image and health? Mental health of elite athletes received a great deal of attention during the Tokyo Olympics. Simone Biles captured public attention as she struggled with the subject. New reporting, though, points to more specific problems with body image and health in college sports, especially among […]
September 5, 2022 — The big problem with pop diets is the presumption that the latest, hottest diet on the scene might be THE ANSWER that everyone’s been looking for. Ironically, non-diet diets fit neatly into this template. It’s all part of the abyss that greets people when they go looking for answers about diet, health, and weight. Evangelists […]
August 13, 2022 — Two new studies in Pediatric Obesity point to a common theme. It seems that healthcare providers, parents, and youth all, for various reasons, may be avoiding the subject of adolescent obesity. It is a difficult subject for all three groups – largely because of concerns about emotional well-being. Whether parents and youth talk about or […]
March 24, 2022 — The economy of shame and pride is at work in human cultures everywhere. Public shaming can take aim at whole countries and companies or at random individuals. In The Shame Machine, Cathy O’Neil describes shame as the foundation for an industry that can destroy people: “Humiliation lingers in the mind, the heart, the veins, the […]
January 5, 2022 — The concept of dieting – restrained eating for the express purpose of weight loss – has hit a well-deserved rough patch. For three decades the implicit answer to obesity has been simple and simplistic: eat less and move more. It doesn’t work well, so dieting has gained a bad reputation. And yet here we are. […]
September 17, 2021 — For some time, it’s been clear to mental health professionals that social media could be a problem for teens. Facebook, which owns Instagram, has long minimized the issue. But reporting this week from the Wall Street Journal tells suggests that Facebook knows from its own research that Instagram promotes self-stigma for teenage girls. Slides from […]
