October 28, 2022 — Medical ethicist Arthur Caplan is struggling. On one hand, he knows shaming people with obesity is clearly wrong. But while he rejects outright shame for people with obesity, he’s struggling with with the idea of acceptance. He decided to talk about this because he was watching the Emmy Awards and Lizzo came on. “For those […]
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 14, 2022 — Last week, when Bill Maher aired a rant about people living with obesity, he put a spotlight his own arrogant beliefs about people living with obesity. We have “gone from fat acceptance to fat celebration,” he said. Somehow, he believes that “to view yourself letting go as a point of pride” is the norm for […]
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 […]
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 […]
December 25, 2021 — OK, I admit it. This has been a rough year for me, so the filter is off. I’ve had enough with the so-called health concerns for Santa that keep coming at me from anonymous trolls. Some of you don’t seem to approve of my lifestyle, my body composition, or my enjoyment of milk and cookies. […]
February 3, 2021 — For people living with obesity, feeling invisible is familiar. For anyone, it’s hard to take. But when a person goes from being invisible to being noticed it can be jolting. Losing weight can do that and thus expose the unspoken bias that routinely confronts people with obesity. Suddenly, people who would once look right through […]
December 18, 2020 — What’s been on your mind this year? One way to answer that question is to look at what grabbed your attention here on ConscienHealth. It’s been a year of keen interest in what we’re writing about. Almost half a million of you have taken time to read what we’ve written so far this year – […]
November 27, 2020 — It’s time for a shift in media narratives about obesity in Western Australia. So says the Health Consumers Council of Western Australia, in concert with the government there. The HCC is a nonprofit voice of the health consumer. It works across many health issues to ensure people have a say in health policy. HCC listened […]
November 17, 2020 — RT-Mart is a hypermarket chain in Taiwan, having a measure of success in mainland China. But last week it set off a furor about fat shaming. For reasons unknowable, the chain replaced the usual S-M-L-XL-XXL clothing sizes with a shaming scheme. Slim, beautiful, rotten, extra rotten, and rotten to the core was the chain’s not […]
