The Fat Doctor Podcast

Send us Fan Mail When your blood tests come back normal and your doctor sends you on your way, that's not a diagnosis – that's a dismissal. In this episode, I follow Priya, a self-employed autistic woman in her late 30s whose 18 months of worsening fatigue, hair loss, skin changes, and irregular periods have been met with advice to exercise more and download a mindfulness app. I walk you...

Send us Fan Mail  Fat patients with chronic pain are routinely sent away with a weight loss lecture. No examination, no blood tests, no referrals. In this episode, I introduce Suki, a teacher and mother whose two years of worsening hip and back pain have been dismissed at every turn, while her thinner colleagues walk away with physiotherapy and x-rays. I break down exactly what conditions get miss...

Send us Fan Mail  Weight stigma doesn't just happen inside the consultation room: it keeps fat people out of it entirely. In this episode, you'll meet Ren. Ren hasn't seen their GP in eighteen months, not out of laziness or neglect, but because the last appointment cost far more than it was worth.  I make the case that medical avoidance is a completely rational response to a system...

Send us Fan Mail  For 20 years, I prescribed weight loss without question at the same time as I was experiencing weight stigma myself as a fat doctor in a fatphobic system. In this special live episode, I'm launching my book No Weigh! Everything You've Been Told About Weight Loss Is A Lie , and sharing exactly what's in it: the lies, the money, the harm, and the tools fat people nee...

Send us Fan Mail The pharmaceutical industry didn't just create a weight loss drug — it created a world in which you cannot escape it. In this episode, I trace Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly's systematic strategy to buy the guidelines, bribe the charities, train the doctors, and lobby the politicians — and I show you exactly how they copied it from the people who gave us the opioid crisis. T...

Send us Fan Mail GLP-1s are being prescribed for everything from arthritis to sleep apnea to low testosterone — with almost no evidence they treat any of it. In this episode, I expose the industry-funded research underpinning the semaglutide gold rush, the risks nobody's talking about (including one that affected a quarter of participants in the study used to license the highest dose), and th...

Send us Fan Mail The marriage between diabetes and ob*sity is nothing more than a PR stunt dressed up as medicine — and it's been running for 25 years. In this episode, I expose how the pharmaceutical industry invented a fictional condition called prediabetes to create a market of 115 million Americans, and then quietly funded the guidelines that put weight loss at the top of the treatment ag...

Send us Fan Mail CW: Fertility treatment, organ donation, BMI based surgical denial Fat people are being denied fertility treatment without evidence to support it, denied organ transplants they would benefit from, and in some cases denied the chance to save a loved one's life. This episode examines the guidelines behind these decisions — and finds them cruel, discriminatory, and scientificall...

Send us Fan Mail Your doctors told you that losing weight would help you live longer, improve your numbers, and protect you from serious illness. It was a lie, and it goes deeper than weight loss. In this episode, I break down why the "ob*sity reduces life expectancy" claim is built on bad maths, why fat may actually protect your health, and why the blood sugar, blood pressure, and chole...

Send us Fan Mail  Your lived experience is real. You lost weight, your health improved, and I'm not calling you a liar. But I'm still going to tell you that weight loss didn't cause it. In this episode, I get into the post-hoc fallacy, the neuroscience of the placebo effect, and why weight loss is the perfect storm for a powerful — but ultimately unsustainable — placebo response. Th...

Send us Fan Mail Doctors are prescribing eating disorders to fat patients — not by accident, not in spite of the guidelines, but because of them. In this episode, I bring the clinical evidence to back up what the fat community has known for years: that severe dieting causes eating disorders, that eating disorders look nothing like the stereotype, and that fat people with eating disorders are being...

Send us Fan Mail In 1944, a group of healthy young men volunteered to be starved in the name of science. What happened to them — physically, psychologically, and socially — is one of the most important pieces of evidence we have about what dieting actually does to the human body. Evidence that has been ignored for 80 years. This week, I break down the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, asks why medi...

Send us Fan Mail  Cancer Research UK calls being fat the second biggest cause of cancer in the UK. It's a claim built on manipulated statistics, false assumptions, and funding from the weight loss industry - and it's actively killing people. In this episode, I show why the evidence for weight and cancer doesn't come close to the evidence for smoking, why population attributable frac...

Send us Fan Mail Disease mongering has transformed human body diversity into a medical crisis requiring pharmaceutical intervention. When Ray Moynihan wrote that "there's a lot of money to be made from telling healthy people they're sick," he exposed a corporate strategy that reaches its most devastating form in the creation of "ob*sity" as a disease. This wasn't...

Send us Fan Mail The Mediterranean diet has become medical gospel—promoted by diabetes organizations, heart health foundations, and doctors worldwide. But when I looked at the actual evidence, I found something shocking: the one major study proving its benefits was so flawed it had to be retracted. And when NICE updated their cardiovascular disease guidelines in 2023, they admitted there was &quot...

Send us Fan Mail Medicine has built an entire mythology around weight as the root cause of disease, including diabetes,  sleep apnea, and arthritis. In this episode, I introduce you to three fictional patients whose stories expose the fatal flaws in this narrative. Through Madison's diabetes diagnosis, Mason's struggle with sleep apnea struggle, and Morgan's joint pain dismissal, I...

Send us Fan Mail Wellness culture didn't start with Instagram. From George Cheyne's 1724 bestseller to Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters redefining fat bodies as "the enemy within," the methods and ideology haven't changed in four centuries—even as the evidence proves they've never worked. In this episode, I trace wellness influencers back to the 17th century, exposing how former...

Send us Fan Mail The weight loss industry has convinced us that being fat is a personal failure—a consequence of eating too much and moving too little. But the truth is far more complex and liberating. Your weight is controlled by genetics, epigenetics, environmental factors, trauma, chronic stress, and systems of oppression that were intentionally designed to control marginalized bodies.  In this...

Send us Fan Mail In 1992, a room full of weight loss experts admitted diets don't work and that weight regain is almost inevitable within five years. Then they recommended diets anyway. Fast forward to 2025, and the UK's NICE guidelines acknowledge weight cycling causes harm, that the evidence is overwhelmingly poor quality, and that people will likely regain the weight. Yet they still r...

Send us Fan Mail In 1995, the WHO published a report stating clearly: "There are no clearly established cutoff points for fat mass or fat percentage that can be translated into cut-offs for BMI." Just three short years later, they published a completely different report calling ob*sity a "disease". Not just a disease, but a "rapidly growing threat" and a "global...

Send us Fan Mail We've been told our entire lives that there's such a thing as a "healthy weight" - but the foundations of this belief are built on quicksand. In this episode, I trace the shocking history of how weight categories were created, exposing the corrupt origins of BMI and "ideal weight" tables invented by life insurance companies to maximize profits. I reve...

Send us Fan Mail  After three false starts and years of research, I've finally finished the first draft of No Weigh. This wasn't supposed to be just another book debunking weight science—it became something more fundamental. I realized I'd been centering myself as a doctor, performing credibility for my colleagues, when I should have been writing for fat patients. This book is for u...

Send us Fan Mail  In this season finale, I'm stripping away the should-dos and reminding you of what truly matters: your rest is non-negotiable, your boundaries deserve enforcement, and joy isn't something you earn—it's your birthright. I share what I've learned about unmasking, choosing authenticity over performance, and grabbing those small moments of joy even when the world...

Send us Fan Mail After a year of exploring wellness culture and its discriminatory foundations, I've identified 10 arguments people use to justify discrimination against fat people—and I'm dismantling every single one. From the "health concern" disguise to the false claim that being fat is a choice, from economic justifications to the burden of proof fallacy, these arguments co...

Send us Fan Mail This holiday season, you'll hear countless claims about weight and health dressed up as concern or common sense. But beneath every "everybody knows" and "the experts say" lies a logical fallacy waiting to be dismantled. In this episode, I arm you with the tools to recognize and challenge the flawed reasoning behind anti-fat rhetoric from ad hominem attacks...