Episode Details

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As the diet industry works hard to co-opt the language of weight-neutral health and fat liberation and misuse it to sell weight loss interventions, I’m seeing more and more “anti-weight bias” trainings that are actually just diet industry marketing in disguise.

Sometimes the trainers are very aware of what they are doing, sometimes they are actually well-meaning but simply duped by diet culture. Regardless, this is especially dangerous since the attendees leave thinking that they’ve learned how to reduce or eliminate weight stigma, when in fact what they’ve learned is how to be uncompensated, unwitting marketers for the diet industry, increasing weight stigma in the process.

Here are some common red flags

The trainer is one or more of the following:

* Involved in “ob*sity medicine”

* Paid to sell/prescribe/provide weight loss interventions

* Taking payments from the weight loss industry

* Represents an astroturf organization like the Ob*sity Action Coalition, Ob*sity Society etc.

Taking the position that “I don’t want to stigmatize fat people, but I want to dedicate my career to eradicating them and making sure that no more ever exist” is not an anti-weight stigma stance.

You cannot be invested (ideologically or monetarily) in anti-fatness (aka anti-ob*sity) and be anti-weight stigma, they are mutually exclusive positions.

The training uses pathologizing/person first language

The words “ob*se” and “overw*ight” were literally made up to pathologize and medicalize higher-weight bodies. “Overw*ight” is inherently shaming (as it indicates that a body is “over” whatever is being considered a “correct” weight,) and “ob*se” comes from a Latin word that means “to eat until fat,” so much more stereotype than science there.

Person-first language (saying person with ob*sity, person affected by ob*sity, person with overw*ight etc.) does NOT come from weight-neutral health community or fat liberation community. It was co-opted from disability community (where it is controversial) by the weight loss industry in the service of their goal of declaring that simply existing in a higher-weight body (regardless of any measure or concept of health) is a “chronic lifelong health condition” (that requires their profit-driving interventions.) This is not about reducing stigma, it’s about increasing the bottom line of the weight loss industry.

The training suggests that weight loss is a solution for weight stigma

If they list bullying, lack of accommodation, or other types of weight stigma as a reason that people need access to weight loss interventions (including and especially drugs and surgeries) then they are inciting bias, not reducing it. While weight stigma is real and does real harm, and fat people are allowed to make whatever choices they want in dealing with it, in an anti-bias training it is wildly inappropriate to teach that oppressed people should have to change themselves (including risking their lives and quality of life with dangerous and/or expensive weight loss interventions,) to escape oppression. Teaching that oppressed people should change themselves to suit their oppressors is not an anti-stigma position. Even if someone believes that fat people are less healthy, healthism does not justify weight stigma.

If the curriculum is not focused on creating a world that fully a