Posts Tagged ‘weight stigma’

Make no mistake about it. The times are changing. A new order is coming and old ways of doing things will not suffice. We are not merely talking about a change of leadership in Washington. We are talking about bigger changes. These changes come from people fed up with an old order of things that […]

We confess to being fed up with campaigns right now. But three articles in JAMA Pediatrics shine an especially harsh light on childhood obesity campaigns in two forms. One is the PSA approach exhorting families to beware of childhood obesity. The other is the practice of weighing and measuring kids in school and sending BMI […]

RT-Mart is a hypermarket chain in Taiwan, having a measure of success in mainland China. But last week it set off a furor about fat shaming. For reasons unknowable, the chain replaced the usual S-M-L-XL-XXL clothing sizes with a shaming scheme. Slim, beautiful, rotten, extra rotten, and rotten to the core was the chain’s not […]

Leave fat kids alone. That’s the proposal from Aubrey Gordon in the New York Times, and she makes a compelling case. A war on childhood obesity mutated into a war on fat kids for four decades and accomplished almost nothing good. In fact, it left many kids, such as Gordon, burning up with feelings of […]

October is National Bullying Prevention Month because bullying should never be a part of childhood. So we find ourselves wondering. Can we find the mute button for bullying? Are parents, teachers, and coaches giving bullies an open mic for weight-based bullying? Complicity with Weight-Based Bullying Adults are supposedly in charge. But when it comes to […]

Do dietitians who align themselves with Health at Every Size (HAES, a registered trademark) have less weight bias? Does weight bias training help? New research presented at FNCE aimed to find out. The answers were a bit mixed, though. It all depends upon whether you look at explicit or implicit bias. If a dietitian was […]

At FNCE yesterday, weight bias was very much on the minds of 1,401 participants. That’s how many nutrition professionals tuned into the hour-long session we moderated. Colleen Tewksbury, Kellene Isom, and Rebecca Pearl offered impressive insights on challenging weight bias. Clearly, weight bias is all around us. In fact, a new study finds that 57 […]

A new paper from the Rudd Center reminds us how noxious the weight talk in popular media is right now. Rebecca Puhl and colleagues found that weight stigma during the COVID-19 pandemic is toxic. In young adults, past experience of stigma predict problems in coping now. The risk of binge eating triples. Symptoms of depression […]

Bad obesity policies can be worse than nothing at all. You might ask, how can this be? The U.K. obesity strategy provides a case in point. No doubt, the intentions are good. High rates of obesity make the population of the U.K. vulnerable to especially bad outcomes from COVID-19. But flashing danger signs without giving […]

The Obesity Action Coalition is in the midst of a big project to reduce weight bias and stigma. It’s a tough subject that brings strong emotions into play. So research to mark our starting point has to measure how we’re feeling about obesity. And it turns out that the words people use can tell us […]