Episode Details

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I’ve written before about weight stigma in healthcare practice, and I’m currently co-authoring a study with Dr. Lesleigh Owen about the harm weight stigma does to the highest-weight patients. Today I’m going to dig into the research that already exists that explores the harm done to fat* patients by weight stigma.

As we get into the research, a few reminders:

First, weight stigma is rooted in and inextricable from racism and anti-Blackness, and continues to do disproportionate harm to those communities today. I urge you to read Sabrina Strings’ Fearing the Black Body – the Racial Origins of Fat Phobia and Da’Shaun Harrison’s Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness to understand more about this.

Second, typically research over-represents privileged people and under-represents (or fails to represent at all) marginalized people, and thus the harm done to them is also under- or un-represented.

Third, I wrote here about how weight stigma research is often still rooted in anti-fatness. I recommend reading this to contextualize a lot of the research and researchers I will talk about here.

Many of the studies that will be discussed in this article look at perceived weight bias/weight status. In this way, weight stigma can harm people of many different sizes, so just a reminder that weight stigma, in particular structural weight stigma, always does the most harm to those at the highest weights and/or those with multiple marginalized identities.

I also want to point out how often the things that are correlated with both weight stigma and body size are blamed on body size itself without any discussion of weight stigma as a strongly researched possible confounding variable (this is also common with weight cycling and healthcare inequalities.)

In this piece I’ll be looking at studies that show harm to physical and/or mental health, including iatrogenic harm, which means harm that is done by the healthcare system/healthcare practitioners. Weight stigma does much, much more harm in all aspects of the lives of higher-weight people that won’t be examined here. Also, this provides brief overviews of the studies included and is far from an exhaustive list. Please feel free to add other examples in the comments.

Finally, just a reminder that my policy is that when I refer to studies that perpetuate anti-fatness and harm, I will provide enough information to Google them, but I won’t link to them directly.

Last last thing before we dig in: studies refer to this variously as weight stigma, weight bias, sizeism, and other less common (sometimes more stigmatizing!) terms, I’m combining those for the purpose of this article.

Content note: This section will discuss physical and psychological harm that can result from weight stigma, including bias and self-harm, and may be harmful/triggering to higher-weight people, so please take care of yourself

I think therefore I am: Perceived ideal weight as a determinant of health, Muennig et al., 2008

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