October 19, 2021 — FNCE is winding up today after four days of this virtual conference. For information on weight, health, and obesity, the agenda offered some bright spots – most especially content on the lived experience of obesity. But one subject was almost completely absent. Rigorous discussion about weight neutral care, including Health at Every Size, could not […]
October 18, 2021 — All too often, the healthcare experiences of people living with obesity are appalling. And the reason is simple. For many professionals, all they can see is a fat person. More often than not, the answer to every health problem is “you should lose some weight” – irrespective of any consideration of the whole person. So […]
October 12, 2021 — Progress is all around us but it’s not always obvious. Explicit weight bias is getting better, but implicit bias is as bad as ever – perhaps worse. So when people catch themselves and walk back from implicit expressions of bias, we find cause for celebration. Making errors is easy, but to correct errors – especially […]
September 30, 2021 — The “War on Obesity” has claimed many victims, but made little progress against the disease itself. This approach to obesity has done a fine job of setting up a war inside our own heads – self-stigma. “Weight stigma is widespread, damaging and difficult to eradicate,” writes Rebecca Puhl in the Washington Post. In fact, the […]
September 22, 2021 — We have an opportunity before us, say Thiago Gagliano-Jucá and Caroline Apovian. They are writing in Annals of Internal Medicine to reflect on the implications of words we use in healthcare. Specifically, they are talking about the words providers attach to obesity – words like morbid. These are words that leave patients feeling judged. Such […]
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. […]
September 8, 2021 — The first ever systematic review and meta-analysis of weight bias in healthcare professionals is bracing. Blake Lawrence and colleagues have just published it in Obesity. It tells us that weight bias in healthcare has been fully visible for three decades. But the work of reversing it has barely begun. The authors of this analysis note […]
August 18, 2021 — The lived experience of obesity has many dimensions, but one of the most troubling is being invisible. Melanie Bahlke, a remarkable patient advocate from Frankfurt, Germany, explains it beautifully: “I am used to being talked about more than having people talk to me. For everyone I am something different and I am rarely what I […]
August 11, 2021 — Normal and healthy are tricky words. They provide a reference point but at the same time they have the potential to alienate people. Pressure to conform pushes against a desire for acceptance. The culture imposes ideas about sizes and shapes of bodies that are normal or healthy. From this pressure, weight bias emerges. It is […]
