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I write and talk a lot about weight stigma and its negative impacts on health. Today I want to talk about a study that looks at how we can protect ourselves. In September of 2022, Angela Meadows and Suzanne Higgs published “Challenging oppression: A social identity model of stigma resistance in higher-weight individuals.” Big thanks to Dr. Meadows who read a draft of this piece and offered commentary which is quoted below.

This study was the first to attempt to identify what factors predict whether a fat* person does or does not internalize weight stigma. They begin by explaining that, while higher-weight people make up about two-thirds of the population in western countries, weight stigma is still ubiquitous in every area of life including education, healthcare, employment, interpersonal interactions, and in the media. They also point out that being immersed in a culture of weight stigma leads many fat people to internalize that stigma, leading them to devalue themselves.

They explain that “the most fundamental component of weight-related stigma directed at oneself remains the endorsement of negative stereotypes attributed to higher-weight individuals, applying those stereotypes to oneself, and exhibiting reduced self-worth as a result of one’s higher weight status.”

The next piece of this is the fact that internalized weight stigma had been linked to “a wide range of negative health and behavioural outcomes in both treatment-seeking and community sample.”

Given this, the ability to avoid internalizing weight stigma is “generally associated with superior psychological and physiological outcomes compared with stigma internalisation or inaction.”

In order to identify predictors of weight stigma resistance, they examined factors including the alignment with the group “Fat.” They start from social identity theory, which is, as Meadows explains

“A theory of intergroup behaviour that was developed in the 60s and 70s. Evidence from many types of marginalised groups suggest that where people can leave a devalued group, that is usually the strategy they pursue. This is what we knew from experience, but it hadn’t previously been applied to the idea that weight controllability beliefs constitute that permeable/impermeable group boundary, so should predict activism or alternative behaviours.”

In the context of that framework, the assumption was that those who think weight is changeable are likely to be working to leave the “Fat” group to enter the “Not Fat” group, whereas those who have come to the conclusion that long-term significant weight loss is improbable (including through their own experience of weight-cycling) may come to view themselves as permanent members of the “Fat” group. For those members of the “Fat” group, the next determinant of stigma resistance becomes if they believe that they deserve lower status, or if they think that lower status is being unfairly foisted on them.

The study authors created an online survey to measure perceived stigma, level of identification as an “overw*ight*/fat” person, perceived legitimacy of anti-fat discrimination, group permeability, stigma resistance, internalized weight stigma, and global self-esteem. Based on their answers, subjects were sorted into three groups: about a third were “Internalisers” who “tended to agree with statements relating to internalised weight stigma beliefs.” About 17% of the subjects were classified as “Indifferent” - they “tended to disagree or had no strong opinion about statements relating to either weight sti