April 18, 2023 — Consider these two competing headlines. In the Washington Post, Kate Cohen tells us “It’s time to cancel diet culture.” Then with a press release about new papers in Nature Medicine, researchers tell us “Most new Type 2 diabetes cases attributable to suboptimal diet.” It’s a fascinating mashup of causality, attribution, and diet culture. On one […]
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 […]
March 16, 2023 — We are living in an age of amplified contention. Anger can be like a muscle that gets stronger when we exercise it. If you doubt that, take a long look at what social media amplifies. So seeing passionate contention at the intersection of obesity and eating disorders might be unsurprising. But it’s not especially helpful […]
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 […]
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 […]
January 16, 2022 — Critical thinking is vital for progress. It really doesn’t matter whether the goal is overcoming obesity, COVID, or economic hardship. Rigorous, objective analysis allows us to recognize the truth of the situation we’re dealing with and then find solutions. But that’s not the end of the story, because the behavior that flows from critical thinking […]
October 3, 2021 — “Child abuse.” When we wrote earlier this week about new data on bariatric surgery in children with severe obesity, that was one visceral response. Ten years ago, Lindsey Murtagh and David Ludwig trotted out the child abuse label with precisely opposite reasoning. They suggested that parents of children with obesity might be guilty of abuse […]
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 […]
September 11, 2021 — It seems that anger goes far these days. In fact, it crops up in just about every part of the ideological spectrum on a wide variety of topics. On masks, vaccines, racism, and of course, politics, we find people who see things in very polarized ways. The only thing they have in common is anger. […]
November 26, 2020 — We have come to an odd relationship with food, because we are full of contradictions. This American Thanksgiving holiday brings those contradictions into sharp view. While an increasing number of Americans are going hungry, we’re celebrating a national feast day that is a time to give thanks for abundance. Hunger Soaring with the Pandemic At […]
