A Challenge I Can't Recommend

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When I heard from several of you that you had received communication about a so-called challenge called “Your Weight Matters” I immediately assumed that the weight loss industry was at the heart of it. I didn’t have to read too far to find out that I was right. This “challenge” was put out by the “Ob*sity Action Coalition” (OAC) an organization primarily funded by, and acting as a lobbying and marketing arm for, the weight loss industry. 

We’ve talked about how the weight loss industry is pressuring doctors to talk to patients about weight loss as a way to promote their products . This “challenge” works the other end of their marketing strategy by targeting patients and “challenging” them to bring up weight with their doctors. 

The “challenge” is sponsored by Eli Lilly (manufacturer of weight loss drug Zepbound,) Novo Nordisk (manufacturer of weight loss drug Wegovy,) Amgen (whose market capitalization increased $20 billion in May of this year when they announced a competitor for Lilly and Novo’s drugs - content note, link includes weight stigma,) Boehringer Ingelheim (who announced in July of this year that they are beginning trials for a new weight loss drug,) and Currax (distributor of weight loss drug Contrave).

Image Description:
URL yourweightmatters dot org

Sponsored by

Lilly   Novo Nordisk
Amgen Boehringer Ingelheim Currax

The OAC, for its part, claims to be “the nation’s leading voice on ob*sity” but takes the majority of its funding from the weight loss industry. 

I do think it’s worth mentioning that none of this is new from a marketing perspective. The American Pain Foundation claimed to be the nation's “largest advocacy group for pain patients.” They took nearly 90% of their money from the pharma and device industry including Purdue Pharma - makers of Oxycontin. Their message around opioids was that “The risk of addiction is overblown, and the drugs are underused.”

At any rate, I went to the OAC’s website, and filled out the form to get the “toolkit”

It begins by saying to use this toolkit to:

Understand how your weight impacts your health. 

Learn about safe and effective weight-loss options. 

Prepare for The Challenge you pledged to take: Have a discussion about your weight with your healthcare provider.  

The first two strike me as a bit odd since science is far from clear about if/how weight impacts health and there are no safe, effective, evidence-based options for long-term, significant weight loss, and that includes, so far, these new drugs. The third strikes me as incredibly psychologically manipulative. 

The toolkit is a lot of oversimplified fat = bad, weight loss = good nonsense, along with busted myths like the old “Weight-loss as small as 5-10% can reduce the effects of having excess weight.” which fails to stand up to both basic logic and research. Also, if the phrase “effects of having excess weight” seems ridiculous it’s because it is. It’s part of a semantic full court press to expand the weight loss industry’s market as much as possible. If you read enough you’ll also notice that a core part of the strategy is to avoid ever creating an appropriate, scientific definition of “excess weight.”

Then there’s advice that the 1980’s wants back and that has been disproven in a century of research including calorie counting and SMART goal setting around body size manipulation attempts and that “The average person burns [x] calories while laughing.” I’ve redacted the actual number to not be triggering but it’s less than 1.5.

Buried in all of the weight loss advice are a few moments of lip service to the idea that it’s not about reaching a “specific size or weight” but then it’s right back to “excess weight” (which, again, they do not define) is bad and weight loss is good. They also make sure to insert the weight-loss-industry-created PR campaign of “weight management” as a “chronic… lifelong journey.”

The toolkit repeatedly tries to point patients to the OAC’s cultivated list of providers. It also mentions that patients may have received this toolkit “at your healthcare provider’s office” which certainly makes it sound like if this works how they want it to, they have manipulated a patient into talking about weight loss with a doctor who has been educated to focus on weight loss.

No matter how well meaning, when both the patients and the doctors are being influenced and educated by the weight loss industry, that certainly raises questions about whether the care that higher-weight patients are receiving is ultimately in their best interest, or in the best interest of the weight loss industry’s bottom line. 

If a patient is asking about weight loss, I suggest providers ask question, carefully listen, discuss all the options, provide true informed consent and offer true patient-centered care. 

In the meantime, I’ll pass on taking a “challenge” from an organization that is funded by the weight loss industry to talk to my doctor about…checks notes…weight loss.

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More research and resources:
https://haeshealthsheets.com/resources/

*Note on language: I use “fat” as a neutral descriptor as used by the fat activist community, I use “ob*se” and “overw*ight” to acknowledge that these are terms that were created to medicalize and pathologize fat bodies, with roots in racism and specifically anti-Blackness. Please read Sabrina Strings Fearing the Black Body – the Racial Origins of Fat Phobia and Da’Shaun Harrison Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness for more on this.