December 17, 2024 — One of the harms that weight stigma causes is the avoidance of medical care. But an unexpected side effect of GLP-1 therapy in persons with overweight or obesity may be increased engagement with healthcare. This insight comes from a new analysis of electronic health records for 711,783 persons. As the use of these medicines for […]
October 14, 2024 — Are we on the way to ending weight stigma or is it more stubbornly persistent than we might imagine? We found a clue to the persistence of bias in health professionals in a new commentary published by the Washington Post. From his perch at the Harvard Medical School, Dr. Preston Lee writes: “Like many doctors, […]
July 3, 2024 — Nope, says Dr. Alissa Chen. Medicare shouldn’t start covering obesity medicines. Her dad, 72, has obesity that began when he was in grad school and has persisted throughout his life. Now he has the cardiovascular disease that often results from untreated obesity. But no, she doesn’t want him to receive treatment with advanced medicines proven […]
June 10, 2024 — For some time, one of the tenets of the fat acceptance movement has been that the health harms of obesity have been grossly exaggerated. Rather, it is the psychological stress of fat phobia that explains the poor health outcomes associated with obesity. In selling her fat acceptance book, philosopher Kate Manne insists obesity itself is […]
June 5, 2024 — Big change sometimes happens very quietly. For example, on April 5, the AP Stylebook added a new entry on “obesity, obese, overweight.” It goes into a great deal of detail about language for writing about obesity. But here is the heart of the matter, in the words of the Associated Press stylebook editors: “The phrasing […]
April 29, 2024 — What does it take to change the explicit and implicit bias that people have about others and themselves based solely upon body weight or fatness? New research tells us that we should pay attention to cognitive dissonance. In other words, we should be asking, does our weight bias reflect our beliefs? Or is there a […]
April 28, 2024 — Daniella Lamas is a critical care physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. She recalls telling the wife of a patient who was dying something she did not want to hear about her husband’s care. The woman told Lamas: “Why should I believe you? I don’t think that I do.” The Imperative for Trust […]
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 22, 2024 — Scholars have noted that in lower income countries, obesity can be taken as a signal of wealth. This observation in turn fuels a presumption that weight stigma might not be a problem in countries of the Global South. But a new scoping review in Obesity Facts suggests this presumption is likely false. Laura Eggerichs, Oliver […]
October 20, 2023 — Cultural norms regarding body image vary all around the world. Likewise, priorities and perspectives about health are quite variable, too. So we find it quite remarkable that a global view of the difficult issue of weight stigma emerged this week with leadership from the World Obesity Federation in Obesity Reviews. We note that, with the […]
