Posts Tagged ‘weight discrimination’

Nine years ago, before the Obesity Action Coalition (OAC) formed, people with obesity had no voice in health policy to address obesity. Work on obesity treatment was slowing to a standstill and many efforts to address obesity did more to stigmatize people with obesity than to improve our health. Today, thanks to the OAC, the […]

Weight bias is getting four kinds of critical public attention that gives hope we’re turning a corner on this problem. Increasingly it’s being called out as unacceptable fat shaming. A quick look at Google Trends shows you that 2012 was the year people started taking notice of “fat shaming.” Before That it simply didn’t show […]

First-year medical students express more explicit bias against people with obesity than they do against minorities, gays, lesbians, and poor people. Say the authors of this new study in Obesity: This relatively high level of explicit weight bias may result from low internal or external pressure to appear unbiased against obese people. These data suggest that […]

The difference between being big and having obesity is both subtle and great. It complicates many conversations about obesity when it gets blurred by fuzzy thinking. A prime example is the argument still simmering about so-called “healthy obesity.” The argument is a stupid one, but people get sucked into it because they gloss over the […]

Sitting in a standard coach airline seat makes United’s “Flyer Friendly” commercial into a bit of a joke. You know the one — an entire symphony orchestra sits in coach class and magically has enough room to play Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” There’s no mistaking this for reality TV. The thing is, it’s no joke […]

Discrimination against big people can result from a naive understanding of obesity as a simple matter of size and weight. But increasingly, the AMA ruling that obesity is a disease is leading employment law experts to warn business that discriminating against people because of their size is a risky practice. Claudia Center of the Legal […]

Wellness and health plans increasingly purport to address obesity, but the the actual experience for people in those plans is a bit of hit or miss. Some plans appear to be thoughtfully designed to encourage people to live the healthiest lives they can. Others not so much — their focus is more on marginalizing people […]

Healthcare experiences vary widely. Variances in the quality of care based on gender, race, and weight status have been reported, but a deep understanding of what’s driving these variations is a challenge. Rebecca Puhl, Kimberly Gudzune, and others have published good studies of the effects that stigmatizing experiences in healthcare have upon patients with obesity. […]

Impulsiveness is a false assumption made about people with obesity. It relates to a common, false weight bias — that people with obesity are undisciplined and cannot control their own impulses. A new study published in Obesity provides some objective data to put this bias in perspective. Katrijn Houben and colleagues looked critically at the […]

A fitness blogger described by some as a “hot mom” and by others as a “fat-shaming bully” has garnered considerable attention this week by complaining loudly when she was banned from Facebook. The spark for this action came when she “decided to vent on the current state of our obesity crisis in America.” She was […]