January 18, 2024 — E.B. White is long gone from this life and Block That Metaphor! is dormant at The New Yorker. But we need them back. The Washington Post has a new and twisted metaphor about obesity treatment, casting Ozempic as something like orthodontia. Kate Cohen writes: “I always thought I’d be thin if I were rich. “I’d […]
January 5, 2023 — One of the easy predictions to make for 2023 is that it will be a year of hot debates about obesity. We have plenty of hot topics to choose from, but one of the hottest is what to do with BMI. It is firmly planted in the landscape of discussions about obesity because it can […]
December 19, 2022 — Every now and then we have to suppress an eye roll when someone tells us that weight bias is not a relevant concern where they are. If only. We have to suppress an eyeroll and find a gentle way to encourage them to think again about the impact of weight bias in their setting. Two […]
July 13, 2021 — Weight stigma is a global problem. The World Obesity Federation gets high marks for launching a global working group to develop a common understanding of this problem across diverse cultures around the world. Whenever a person encounters stigma due to size and weight, their health and wellbeing diminishes. But context matters. In some cultures, thinness […]
August 19, 2020 — There’s no way to gloss over this mess. Nor should we. The Journal of Internal Medicine made a terrible mess when they published a paper on the role of physiology in African American women with obesity. That mess exposes the how blind people can be to racism. We are perhaps even more blind to the […]
November 8, 2017 — Is it a coincidence? Lately we’ve been seeing a lot of sensational headlines from the UK, loaded with blame for people living with obesity. Some parts of the NHS have adopted rules to deny surgery to people with obesity. Tabloids run headlines about “obese patients eating themselves to DEATH.” Examples of sensational blame directed at […]
