September 1, 2024 — How is the Health at Every Size (HAES) movement coping with advances in obesity science? The need for fighting weight bias is as great as ever. But relevance of the anti-science dimension of HAES – suggesting that obesity is not a valid health concern – is fading. It simply doesn’t hold up well in light […]
March 19, 2024 — Celebrity weight loss is a bane to the world. For years, Oprah found herself sucked into it and, as a result, took on a lot of self-stigma. In an hour-long program on ABC last night, though, she shared her new awareness of this: “I have to say that I took on the shame that the […]
February 3, 2024 — We confess to a significant amount of fatigue with a social agenda related to size and weight getting overlaid on the medical concern of obesity. The bickering of people who want to make believe that obesity is a purely social issue can be too much to bear. This has been one of those weeks. Moral […]
June 11, 2023 — Health stigma presents a difficult problem because it prompts competing human impulses of cruelty and denial. Together, these impulses get in the way of better health. Attach stigma to a disease or a health condition and the people who have it begin to feel socially undesirable and isolated. So understandably, they may hide the condition, […]
January 16, 2023 — We are living in a pivotal moment for the public understanding of a common and complex chronic disease. It is a moment when two competing, but very different, lies about obesity are falling apart. Simply Bad Choices On one hand, the big lie about obesity for decades has been that it is a simple matter […]
October 13, 2022 — Weight continues to be a subject for hot debate in popular culture. Most people live somewhere between the extremes of fat shaming and fat activism, just navigating life and sometimes feeling judged because of implicit ideas that people have about the normal human diversity of body size and shape. For population health, it’s indeed a […]
August 7, 2022 — Bill Maher has a full-time commitment to bigotry, says Eric Wemple at the Washington Post. Stereotypes about Asian women, gender, Islam, the N-word – at various times he finds a place for all of them in his dubious humor. But really, the talent he has is the talent of a bully and this is the […]
April 17, 2022 — Obesity is a slur. This statement framed the opening to a recent symposium at the UC Berkeley School of Public health. The subject was weight inclusive public health. The goal was dialogue to address systemic anti-fatness and racism embedded in public health, medicine, and the food system. It’s a lot. On one hand a caricature of […]
February 10, 2022 — What is it about body weight and obesity that activates so many people in so many different ways? As people weigh the rituals of body weight, the reactions may be very different, but they are often just as intense as they are diverse. In the Washington Post today, Fortesa Latifi writes with intensity about telling […]
September 19, 2021 — The Trust for America’s Health (TFAH) is out with its annual report on obesity. The headline? It’s bad and getting worse. But any mention of the lived experience for real persons with obesity is absent. Empathy doesn’t fit with a strategy focused on catastrophizing the problem of too many people living with obesity. The implicit […]
