August 11, 2021 — Normal and healthy are tricky words. They provide a reference point but at the same time they have the potential to alienate people. Pressure to conform pushes against a desire for acceptance. The culture imposes ideas about sizes and shapes of bodies that are normal or healthy. From this pressure, weight bias emerges. It is […]
April 29, 2021 — One reason that obesity can be such a difficult topic is because people link it to appearance. Thus we live in a culture where people presume they can diagnose a person’s health based on body image. Looking healthy becomes a surrogate for being healthy. People do very unhealthy things to reach for a healthy appearance. […]
April 18, 2021 — It’s official. We seem to be in the early stages of a new denim cycle. Looser fitting jeans with a high waist or a flare at the bottom are in. The pandemic may have hastened the demise of skinny jeans, says Levi Straus CEO Chip Bergh: “This is not the first time we’ve seen this […]
February 4, 2021 — Writing in the Guardian, Dejan Jotanovic captures a fundamental flaw in the public conception of obesity. It is a singular fixation on weight loss, before and after. It squeezes life into two snapshots, leaving little respect for diversity: “My difficulty with body transformation photos is that we’re all somebody’s before and somebody else’s after in […]
January 10, 2021 — It never fails. In the UK, Cosmopolitan can stir up a controversy simply by suggesting that people of all sizes can have good health. A provocative cover story did the trick. Piers Morgan is happy to participate and stir the pot. But in the end, this is not a story about obesity. In fact, conflating […]
February 10, 2020 — Childhood obesity is a difficult subject. Many adults are walking around with intense feelings from rejection and derision in childhood because of their body size, shape, and weight. Children can be cruel. Sometimes adults are even crueler. So an obvious question arises. When children and youth need obesity care, what is the effect on psychological […]
October 13, 2019 — The fitness industry is booming. But is it promoting fitness and health? Or is it promoting an unhealthy preoccupation with body image? Writing for The Lily, Nicole Chung reflects on this dilemma. Becoming a fitness instructor, she got herself into great shape. However, she found that her body image issues grew worse than ever as […]
August 25, 2018 — This week has been long and filled with serious news. So, we’re filled with gratitude for a hilariously absurd story from ITV and the British press. They’ve given us a load of comic relief to end the week. You might think of it as a load of something else, but we’re keeping it clean here. With […]
June 25, 2018 — The headlines are jolting. Body positivity causes people to think they aren’t obese, says Newsweek. It is a threat to public health, the reporting suggests. Unfortunately, many other publications came up with similar stories. A new study Friday in Obesity prompted this sensationalism. In her paper, Raya Muttarak does not make the claim of cause and […]
April 3, 2018 — A brilliant flash of popular music in the middle of the 1960s came from the Mamas and the Papas. And the most memorable performer from that group was Cass Elliot – also known as Mama Cass. This was well before anyone thought about obesity as a medical condition. The group sang naive lyrics about “no […]
