December 2, 2021 — The word diet originates from the Greek dieta meaning to live normally. However, nowadays it mostly refers to restricting food to help weight loss rather than a way to enjoy food and health. Throughout history diets have come and gone. Celebrity diets are popular and often bizarre, but are not a new thing. The Daniel […]
November 14, 2021 — It’s hard to miss the zeal that people bring to matters of health, wellness, and fitness. We’re part of it. Believing that health systems should, can, and will do better in helping folks with obesity, we devote silly amounts of time to writing about it daily. The motivation is simply to share information that might […]
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. […]
February 7, 2021 — COVID-19 has rearranged lives all over the world, but today, Americans are having a football game. Urgent pleas from public health folks are putting a lid on big parties. So the emphasis seems to be shifting to far-flung snacking. Social distance, small crowds, or preferably no crowds – people still want their Super Bowl snacks. […]
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 […]
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 […]
January 28, 2021 — Media images of good health are a tricky business. On one hand, fashion and lifestyle businesses are feeling pressure to include more diversity in the imagery they blast at us. But when they do, guardians of public health protest. So we have debates about what is healthy to show people in Cosmopolitan. Or the health […]
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 […]
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 […]
August 2, 2020 — Football has a few problems. For one thing, there’s the brain injury kerfuffle. But fewer kids are getting hurt now because fewer are playing football. So that’s a plus. But on the negative side of the ledger, we have the strong desire to get back to football this fall crashing into a tiny little virus […]
