Posts Tagged ‘weight discrimination’

Mental health issues seem to be one more excuse for discrimination in obesity care. A new study of people with controlled but complex mental histories examines their outcomes in bariatric surgery. The outcomes, the study finds, can be entirely comparable to outcomes for people with other psychiatric disorders or even no psychiatric disorder. Lauren Thomson and […]

There’s no denying it. We’re screwed up when the subject comes to health and body weight. That’s why body positivity — loving your body as it is — is an important concept gaining traction with the American public. But when you throw obesity into the mix, the conversation gets complicated. It gets complicated because people […]

We occasionally hear from folks who find the notion that obesity is a disease to be quite offensive. In support of this perspective, the argument is that obesity cannot be a disease because everybody knows obesity is simply a label for having a high BMI. In other words, obesity is just a word used to pathologize people […]

We bump into quite a bit of moral outrage on the subject of obesity. In fact, Paul Campos and others contend that the language of the “obesity epidemic” is nothing more than an expression of moral panic serving to marginalize people who live at the high end of the normal diversity in body size. Elsewhere, as the […]

This week, it’s becoming apparent that obesity is fraught with risks for microaggression. When we write about weight bias and discrimination, we find that there’s a good chance of stepping on toes by mixing in any mention of health issues related to obesity. After writing about wellness programs opening the door to discrimination against people […]

Has the infatuation with incentive-based employer wellness programs “inadvertently put a target on the backs of employees who are dealing with obesity?” That’s the concern expressed recently by OAC Vice President James Zervios. He’s not alone in sounding an alarm about health discrimination. A new commentary in The Hill warns that penalties in wellness programs will promote […]

Buried in the jargon of a paper newly published in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied is a stunning observation. Weight bias comes from feeling disgusted by people with obesity — thinking they are not trying hard enough to fix their problem. “Those people should repent of their obesity” seems to be the thinking. But then, maybe “thinking” is the wrong word. This […]

The blurry line between accountability and punishment is quite important to long-term outcomes in obesity. The difference between the two is substantial, but easily confused. Where accountability empowers people, punishment does the opposite. Punishment is imposed. Accountability flows from engagement. Though people understand that punishment is an ineffective strategy for behavior change in obesity, the […]

The failure to acknowledge obesity is so common in so many situations that it leads people to observe that obesity hides in plain sight. That was the conclusion of Kirsten Mueller and colleagues from the Mayo Clinic who assessed the accuracy of self-reports about weight status from a series of 508 internal medicine outpatients. Only […]

Novelist Sarai Walker proclaimed in the New York Times this weekend: “Yes, I’m fat. It’s OK. I said it.” Her commentary immediately started trending and it made us wonder, is “fat” losing its sting as an offensive insult? Fat acceptance activists, after all, have accomplished much. As we’ve written before, many signs can be found […]