Weight and Healthcare

I’ve been contacted by a number of people wanting to know if I think that Beachbody’s rebrand to “BODi” really represents a commitment to weight-neutral fitness. I was hopeful at the start but, unfortunately that does not seem to be the case. It seems like they are, at best, paradigm-straddling and, more likely, co-opting the ideas of focusing on health and not size, but maintaining a platform of...

A tweet from a PhD Psychologist was brought to my attention and gives us a perfect example of what not to do if you don't want to harm fat people. Get full access to Weight and Healthcare at weightandhealthcare.substack.com/subscribe

Recently during Q&A after a talk about how to deal with weight stigma at the doctor’s office, one of the participants asked if I had any ideas for what to do when they were so sick of experiencing fatphobia from healthcare providers that they just wanted to not go. This is, unfortunately, a too-common situation. Here are some tips and techniques that can help you get the care that you deserve. Get...

I don’t do a lot of guest posts here, but as I was reading Rachel Fox’s excellent piece “An Open Letter to the Well-Intentioned Medical Students Who Want to Do a Capstone Project on Weight Stigma and Email Me Asking For Advice” I knew I wanted to share it here. I reached out to Rachel who kindly agreed. Get full access to Weight and Healthcare at weightandhealthcare.substack.com/subscribe

This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter ! If you like what you are reading, please consider subscribing and/or sharing! Recently I was made aware of something that was happening with the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) helpline. For the past twenty years, NEDA has run a helpline providing support to tens of thousands of people a year via text, chat, and phone. That helpline was r...

Today we are breaking down Novo Nordisk's 2-year study of their weight loss drug, Wegovy. I want to thank Deb Burgard for her help with this piece. She is quoted and was kind enough to review and give feedback on the piece and I am incredibly grateful! Get full access to Weight and Healthcare at weightandhealthcare.substack.com/subscribe

The public comment period has opened for the US Preventative Services Task Force’s massively ill-advised draft research plan “Weight Loss to Prevent Ob*sity*-Related Morbidity and Mortality in Adults: Interventions” Here is the link to the plan text. Here is the link to comment (you can also go to the link above and click “leave a comment” in the last line of the yellow box at the top of the page)...

Today I’m looking into “New insights about how to make an intervention in children and adolescents with metabolic syndrome: diet, exercise vs. changes in body composition. A systematic review of RCT by Albert Pérez E, Mateu Olivares V, Martínez-Espinosa RM, Molina Vila MD, Reig García-Galbis M This is one of the studies cited by the disastrous American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines. Get full ac...

Jenny Craig has announced that they are shutting down. While I’m deeply sorry for the stress and unemployment it will cause for the employees who really believed they were helping people (because Jenny Craig told them they were,) as far as the program itself, I say good riddance to bad rubbish. Get full access to Weight and Healthcare at weightandhealthcare.substack.com/subscribe

The entire idea of “ob*sity”* is problematic. It’s a made-up concept to pathologize bodies based on shared size rather than shared symptomology. It uses Body Mass Index (BMI) which is a math equation created with a racist basis . If your weight in pounds times 703 divided by your height in inches squared is 30 or more, you are “diagnosed” with “ob*sity.” This does not have the ring of sound scienc...

A very common issue for higher-weight people who are trying to access healthcare is healthcare providers (HCPs) who want to focus on weight and weight loss. Today I’ll give some tips that I’ve learned both from personal experience and as a patient advocate for navigating what I call Provider Weight Distraction. In this episode we look at options to get weight-neutral healthcare, even from HCPs dea...

This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter ! If you like what you are reading, please consider subscribing and/or sharing! One of the ways that the diet industry is trying to squash the weight-neutral health and fat liberation movements is by using their money, clout, and enmeshment in the healthcare system to re-brand themselves as weight stigma experts, including at conferences, panels, and ot...

This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter ! If you like what you are reading, please consider subscribing and/or sharing! In my work around weight science and healthcare, I see a lot of confusion about, and misuse of, statistics. Today I thought I would point out the three of the most common issues that I experience. Sure, intentional weight loss fails 95% of the time, you just have to keep try...

This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter ! If you like what you are reading, please consider subscribing and/or sharing! In part 1 we talked about a request that has been submitted for the World Health Organization (WHO) to add diet drugs (specifically GLP1 agonists like Novo Nordisk’s Saxenda and Wegovy) to their list of “essential medicines.” We discussed who was making this request and the...

This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter ! If you like what you are reading, please consider subscribing and/or sharing! In part 1 we talked about a request that has been submitted for the World Health Organization (WHO) to add diet drugs to their list of “essential medicines.” We discussed who was making this request and the justification that they were using. Today we’re going to take a deep...

This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter ! If you like what you are reading, please consider subscribing and/or sharing! There are a number of different ways that bias can impact the healthcare that higher-weight patients receive. This includes provider bias and structural bias (when the healthcare system is created for thin bodies and/or to the specific exclusion of fat bodies.) Today I want...

This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter ! If you like what you are reading, please consider subscribing and/or sharing! In Part 1 we talked about how Novo Nordisk got suspended from The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry for their shady marketing practices. Today, we’re going to talk about an investigation by The Observer that found what so many of us have been saying for a lo...

This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter ! If you like what you are reading, please consider subscribing and/or sharing! If you have read this newsletter for any period of time, you’ve read my accounts of how pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk has been using extremely shady marketing practices (many taken from the playbook that Purdue Pharma used to push oxycontin) to promote their drugs for...

Transcript This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter ! If you like what you are reading, please consider subscribing and/or sharing! Reader Marcel sent me the following question: I just got diagnosed with sleep apnea. My doctor told me that if I could just lose 5-10% of my body weight, it would go away. I’ve yo-yo dieted all my life and sometimes got to 5% lost before it came back, but never ev...

This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter ! If you like what you are reading, please consider subscribing and/or sharing! In the early days of the pandemic studies were rushed out and highlighted in the media claiming that higher-weight people were at higher risk of COVID death. I wrote about the issues with this in my previous blog , as did Christy Harrison , Paul Campos and others. Now an umb...

This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter ! If you like what you are reading, please consider subscribing and/or sharing! EDIT 7/4/25: I’m excited to say that a project I’ve been working on is now live. The In Our Image Database from the Fat Legal Advocacy, Rights, and Education (FLARE!) Project is a listing of imaging sites that accommodate higher-weight patients. You can search the database,...

Transcript:This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter ! If you like what you are reading, please consider subscribing and/or sharing! I’ve been getting a lot of requests to write about Weight Watchers’ acquisition of Sequence, so here we go. One note that, in order to keep this from becoming Tolstoy-esque in length, there are a lot of links so that you can dig in more where you want! I’ve been w...

Transcript:This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter ! If you like what you are reading, please consider subscribing and/or sharing! I write and talk a lot about weight stigma and its negative impacts on health. Today I want to talk about a study that looks at how we can protect ourselves. In September of 2022, Angela Meadows and Suzanne Higgs published “ Challenging oppression: A social identi...

This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter ! If you like what you are reading, please consider subscribing and/or sharing! 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 har...

Transcript:This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter ! If you like what you are reading, please consider subscribing and/or sharing! The Ob*sity* Action Coalition (OAC) claims to be a non-profit advocacy group for higher-weight people. The truth from my perspective is that they are anything but. I wrote about the OAC in 2014 when their priority had been lobbying the AMA to declare that “ob*sity...