Posts Tagged ‘weight stigma’

Suffering creates a vacuum. But health stigma is always ready to fill that vacuum, so blame and shame flow in and amplify the suffering. This has long been the case with obesity. We’re now seeing it come into play with COVID and even with the intersection of COVID and obesity. This is called blaming the […]

For 53 years, Camp Shane was a place where parents sent kids with overweight and obesity. It called itself “a summer weight loss camp…not a fat camp.” But no more. The camp shut down on July 13 with the owner telling reporters that the problem was a staffing shortage. At the time, the Connecticut Office […]

The lived experience of obesity has many dimensions, but one of the most troubling is being invisible. Melanie Bahlke, a remarkable patient advocate from Frankfurt, Germany,  explains it beautifully: “I am used to being talked about more than having people talk to me. For everyone I am something different and I am rarely what I […]

Nothing rankles quite so much as exploiting kids living with obesity for raw political purposes. Right now, a conservative group is using  images of kids with obesity in a campaign against companies that speak out on voting rights. In this case, they are targeting Coca-Cola with political attack ads, calling the company Woka-Cola. But to […]

Normal and healthy are tricky words. They provide a reference point but at the same time they have the potential to alienate people. Pressure to conform pushes against a desire for acceptance. The culture imposes ideas about sizes and shapes of bodies that are normal or healthy. From this pressure, weight bias emerges. It is […]

Most of us have this voice within us – our inner critic. For a few people, that voice might be missing. But for people living with obesity, it can loom large. This is how self-stigma works. The world is full of implicit bias about larger bodies. The bias is that size is an indication of […]

Is it helpful to use shame for health promotion? The impulse is certainly strong. Shame and blame have been consistent threads through years of grappling with the health impact of obesity. Along the same line, we’re seeing shame and blame trotted out for the unvaccinated in the U.S. as a the Delta variant produces a […]

“I remember just breaking down into tears,” says Safeera Hussainy about her diagnosis of gestational diabetes. This pharmacist and women’s health researcher from Melbourne eventually found empowerment. But new research suggests that this is not the usual case when pregnancy, diabetes, and stigma intersect. Weight stigma itself – even more than BMI – seems to […]

. Lazy. Unmotivated. No self-discipline. No willpower. These are just a few of the widespread stereotypes ingrained in American society about people who have a higher body weight or larger body size. Known as weight stigma, these attitudes result in many Americans being blamed, teased, bullied, mistreated, and discriminated against. There is nowhere to hide […]

Weight stigma is a global problem. The World Obesity Federation gets high marks for launching a global working group to develop a common understanding of this problem across diverse cultures around the world. Whenever a person encounters stigma due to size and weight, their health and wellbeing diminishes. But context matters. In some cultures, thinness […]