Category: weight prejudice and bias

Mocked for Being Too Thin? What It Says About Fat Shaming

In an interview with HuffPostLive, television personality Giuliana Rancic describes how she endures taunts for her extreme thinness in social media. The interviewer seems to be suggesting that Rancic is very thin as a result of having battled cancer but she looks about the same today as she did before her diagnosis. Rancic wants to …

Continue reading

“Turned to Food for Comfort” What Does It Really Mean?

Few expressions make me bristle more than someone saying they or someone else “turned to food for comfort” as the “reason” why a person is overweight. This has become a way to say that someone is fat because there’s something wrong with them and that wrong thing is their inability to control themselves around food …

Continue reading

Weight Loss Reality TV Reaches a Shocking New Low “My Big Fat Revenge”

I wouldn’t have thought there could be a weight loss reality TV show more offensive and exploitative than Biggest Loser but “My Big Fat Revenge” on the Oxygen network is beyond comprehension. Overweight women tearfully recount stories of humiliation then plot revenge against their tormentors. The two women in the episode I watched seem to have …

Continue reading

If It’s Not Emotional Eating, Why DID You Get Fat?

If I’m going to make the case against the idea that very overweight people are all “broken” and filled with self-loathing, indulging in emotional eating all the way to serious obesity because of stress or trauma they’re struggling to deal with, then why do I think people get very fat and why do they stay …

Continue reading

Have You Become Who You’ve Been Told You Are? Rejecting Weight Bias

I look at weight loss “support” groups periodically and I was quite shocked to see this comment from someone talking about women who had lost a significant amount of weight: I think that post-obese women—are stunted and the worst—because they’re stuck in the mindset/emotionally fucked where they became obese. So you have to be “emotionally …

Continue reading

Why Can It Take a Lifetime to Lose Weight?

I would greatly prefer it if my brain would be less preoccupied with thoughts of doughnuts but it’s running its own show up there. I’ve often mused over what more I could accomplish if I did not have to devote any energy to trying to suppress all those food thoughts that bang around the ole …

Continue reading

Even the Famous and Accomplished Struggle with Weight

What’s it like to be well-known, in the public eye and struggle with weight? I happened to see a couple items in the news today. A terrible boardwalk fire has New Jersey’s governor, Chris Christie, in the media spotlight. Here’s a photo from a current news story:  You may be aware the Governor had lap …

Continue reading

Do You Call Yourself a Food Addict? Reconsidering Weight Bias

Do you call yourself a “food addict”? Does it seem that an awful lot of people would like to believe overweight is primarily a purely behavioral issue and those of us who have dealt with serious obesity must be out of control “addicts”? The Centers for Disease Control define “obese” (vs “overweight”) as having a …

Continue reading

Being Mindful of the Fat Labels We Assign to Ourselves

Words are so very powerful. Just read Orwell’s 1984 for a chilling glimpse of a world so intensely controlled by propaganda, it’s possible to commit a “thoughtcrime.” How powerful are words in your life? Think for a moment about the fat labels you might apply to yourself. Do you call yourself a food addict? Do …

Continue reading

Managing Our Weight: It’s NOT a Level Playing Field

My primary objective is to break down the paradigm that says if you are overweight, there’s “something wrong” with you and replace that with the fact that some of us are simply born with bodies that want to be larger and brains that want to think about food. It’s only logical! Consider that our culture …

Continue reading