Episode Details

This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter! If you like what you are reading, please consider subscribing and/or sharing!I spend a massive amount of time digging into weight stigma research and much of it is incredibly frustrating because of how often research around weight stigma still takes (and supports) views that are, in and of themselves, rooted in weight stigma.

The overarching problem is that much of this research is still predicated on the idea that fatness* is bad and should be eradicated. (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that much of this research is funded and/or conducted by people with a profit interest in selling weight loss, and that people who are working from a weight-neutral perspective can have a much more difficult time getting prestige and funding.) Commonly these studies use stigmatizing terms (like ob*se*, overw*ight, and associated person-first language) or describe fat people’s bodies using terms like “excess weight,” and describe fat people simply existing in the world as an “epidemic.”

One way weight stigma shows up in weight stigma research is the idea that weight stigma is bad because it may cause weight gain or make people less likely to participate in and “comply with” weight loss interventions which, again, bases so-called “anti-stigma” work firmly in anti-fatness.

Another is the suggestion that weight loss is a weight stigma intervention. Each fat person is of course allowed to make personal decisions about how they will deal with weight stigma. That said, it’s important to be clear that, regardless of what one believes about fat and health, suggesting that the solution to oppression is for oppressed people to change themselves to suit their oppressors is absolutely wrong. And while no two oppressions are completely comparable, as someone who is both fat and queer I definitely see the parallels between the message I get as a fat person that losing weight would solve weight stigma, and the messages I have received as a queer person that the best way to deal with homophobia is to become straight.

The message becomes “we don’t want to stigmatize fat people, but we do think they should be eradicated from the Earth and future fat people should be prevented from ever existing.” (Often with the fact that the organization generating the research is profiting from these anti-fat views left unspoken.) You cannot promote the idea that it would be better if current fat people were eliminated and future fat people were prevented from existing and also end weight stigma, these are mutually exclusive goals even though the weight loss industry has been working overtime to convince us otherwise.

For me one of the most frustrating examples of weight stigma in research is the ignoring/erasure of the experience of those at the highest weights. While weight stigma can harm people of all sizes, as people’s weights become higher, their experience of bias and structural stigma (including lack of accommodation) increase. (Again, this also becomes more pronounced for those with multiple marginalized identities.)

Within fat activism communities, the varying sizes are often defined as small fat, mid fat, large fat, super fat and infinifat. (There is an in-depth article about this here.) Within the medical community, categories are overw*ight, Class 1, Class 2, and Class 3 ob*sity. From a scientific/medical perspective this is questionable.  

For example, per the NIH calculat