Posts Tagged ‘weight discrimination’

There’s nothing subtle about it. When people with obesity seek healthcare, what they receive is second class care – at best. Writing in Vox, physician Farah Naz Khan succinctly describes the situation that people with obesity face: Obese patients often can’t even get standard medical procedures. Health care providers are generally ill-equipped to deal with […]

A fitness culture is spreading around the world that has great potential to promote better health and well-being. But even a small element of shaming can undermine all of that. Look at fashion, look at daily routines everywhere, and the fitness culture is impossible to miss. While much of life has become a sedentary ritual of enslavement to glowing rectangles, […]

When perverse ideas about incentives for health fall apart, everyone can celebrate. Today we celebrate one that is losing support: penalizing employees for obesity. For several years now, certain elements of the wellness industry have been pushing the idea that obesity could be reversed by imposing financial penalties on employees who don’t weight what their employers say they […]

Ira Glass and This American Life get a B+ for telling stories about fatness on this popular public radio program. In an episode called “Tell Me I’m Fat,” Glass presents a pretty complete picture of the pervasive bias against people living in big bodies. Roughly half of the episode revolves around Lindy West and her experience “coming […]

London Mayor Sadiq Khan is receiving mixed reviews for banning advertisements on London’s public transportation that promote an unhealthy body image. Advertising for a weight loss supplement first stirred up this controversy a year ago. More than 70,000 people supported a change.org petition to have beach body ready advertising removed from publication. Khan fulfilled a campaign […]

Discipline – or the lack of it – is something that is sometimes offered up as an explanation for obesity. Public health professionals, employers, and physicians gathered at a medical forum in Baltimore last week to discuss obesity and how health plans can address this growing health concern. One physician who is medical director for a large health […]

Facebook recently walked right into a controversy it didn’t need when it rejected an ad that featured an image of plus-size model Tess Holliday, calling the image a violation of its “health and fitness policy.” Holliday is a plus-size model and body positivity advocate. Facebook’s censors weren’t quite ready for the storm that followed. They […]

Childhood obesity campaigns largely ignore the 4.5 million children in America who are already living with severe childhood obesity. A new study in Child Development provides a vivid understanding of how severe obesity shapes the social and emotional lives of these children by the time they enter sixth grade. While children with milder excess weight […]

New EEOC regs issued yesterday mark an important fork in the road to employee wellness. The regulations provide clarity for employers who want to impose penalties on people with chronic diseases in their wellness programs. Reactions to these rules could hardly be more diverse. You can find people who think employers should have an even bigger stick to wield in their […]

Bias hits people who live with the chronic disease of obesity, and the professionals who devote their careers to overcoming it, with a double dose – obesity bias squared. Intellectual bias that favors personal convictions in obesity and nutrition has a profound effect on research and the scientific literature in obesity. Writing in Clinical Obesity, Krista […]