Posts Tagged ‘weight discrimination’

Today we have the pleasure of presenting a guest post by Asheley Cockrell Skinner. She works at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, where she conducts research on health policy, obesity, and pediatrics. We are grateful to her for allowing us to post her thoughtful perspective here. Is obesity a disease? This is a question I […]

A workshop on cross-sector obesity projects at the Institute of Medicine leaves us wondering: do we talk about obesity in polite company? The title of the workshop — Cross-Sector Work on Obesity Prevention, Treatment, and Weight Maintenance: Models for Change — didn’t exactly match the content. It was really about obesity prevention and community transformation projects. A succession […]

A new analysis in the European Journal of Health Law seems guaranteed to draw you in to read this perspective on weight stigma as a tool against obesity. Nothing whatsoever in the title or the abstract tells the reader where this scholar of health law, Mette Hartlev, is going with the suggestion that “the use […]

The opening of the Obesity Action Coalition’s YWM2014 national convention featured national and local advocacy training to help people affected by obesity find their voice and bring needed change to policies and social norms that shape the quality of their lives. A decade ago, people affected by obesity had no voice whatsoever in policy decisions […]

Bias blocks progress toward evidence-based approaches to addressing obesity in a number of ways highlighted by recent publications. One is a commentary by Rebecca Puhl and Ted Kyle published by the Institute of Medicine (IOM). Another is a study of 2,944 British adults over the age of 50 and their experiences with fat shaming. Here are […]

Laughing at diseases, disabilities, and discrimination is very different from laughing at people with a disease, disability, or outsider status. In the former group, the target is an unjust harm. In the latter group, the target is a person. People laugh at misfortunes to cope with them. But laughing at people — especially people already unjustly harmed […]

Many people with obesity still find themselves locked out of healthcare for the biggest threat to their health — obesity. How can this be, you ask? Didn’t the Affordable Care Act (ACA) solve all those problems? Not quite. Don McNay’s story illustrates the problem quite well and it’s well worth reading over at the Huffington […]

Hubris, helplessness, compassion, and respect surface in a remarkably complete examination of the implications arising from deeming obesity to be a disease. Just published in Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics, this narrative symposium is required reading for anyone who wants to spout an opinion on the subject. The symposium includes 12 personal accounts (15 online) of experiences […]

The word fat seems to be in a state of transition. On one hand, fat activists are reclaiming the word with pride. Media is feeling some license to use the word to grab our attention with headlines like “What makes us Fat?” And then there’s the Weather Channel serving up Fat Guys in the Woods, more […]

Arguing about weight is a fool’s errand. But the impulse to tell someone else how much they should weigh lies under the surface of a new analysis published by CDC. Neda Sarafrazi and colleagues from the National Center for Health Statistics found that nearly 48% of boys and 36% of girls with obesity between the […]