Four Ways To Spot a Fake Anti-Weight-Stigma Event

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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 other events. This can be done by large weight loss industry representatives like the Ob*sity* Action Coalition or by individuals.

It is imperative that we do not let this happen, because their goal is to co-opt the concept of eradicating weight stigma and use it to sell weight-loss interventions that risk the health and lives of higher-weight people (which, in turn, increases weight stigma by perpetuating the idea that being fat is so terrible that it’s worth risking fat people’s lives and quality of life in attempts to make them thin.)

So, here are four major red flags that an event that claims to be about ending weight stigma may actually be about co-opting anti-weight-stigma work to sell dangerous, expensive “treatments” for fat people.

There are no (fat-positive) fat people speaking

There is absolutely no excuse for this, but that doesn’t mean we don’t hear them. I think my personal [least] favorite is “we are looking for experts rather than lived experience.” This is wrong in every way I can think of. First of all, lived experience of stigma gives one expertise that cannot be gained in any other way. Beyond that, unless by “experts” they mean “thin people” then there is literally no type of expert that does not include fat people. Doctors, academics, researchers, statisticians, whatever they are looking for, they could find a fat expert. The idea that someone is either an expert in weight stigma or a fat person is weight stigma.

Bottom line: If there are no fat-positive fat people speaking at an event, then this isn’t truly an anti-weight-stigma event. I will say that I have consulted with people in situations where they were speaking at such an event as a harm reduction tool after they tried to get a fat speaker booked and failed, but this shouldn’t be happening.

Representatives from the weight loss industry are speaking

They could be representing the weight loss industry directly, through one of their programs (like Novo Nordisk’s absolutely ridiculous “It’s Bigger Than Me” campaign,) or through an astroturf organization like the “Ob*sity Action Coalition.”

This is also why in the first category I specifically said “fat-positive fat people.” Fat people are allowed to want to eradicate fatness in themselves, including as a way for them to try to escape weight stigma, but that doesn’t make it an anti-weight-stigma view, especially if they are representing the weight-loss industry or claiming to represent all fat people. (To me, as someone who is both fat and queer, it would be similar to an anti-homophobia panel with a bunch of straight people and one gay panelist who was undergoing so-called “conversion therapy” to become an ex-gay and was representing the interests of the companies selling the therapy.)

They are using stigmatizing terminology

If they are using terms and/or aligning with concepts like “ob*sity,” “person with ob*sity” or “ob*sity epidemic then they are perpetuating stigma. The idea of pathologizing body sizes is, first and foremost, rooted in racism, weight supremacy, and anti-Blackness and I highly recommend reading  Sabrina Strings’ Fearing the Black Body – the Racial Origins of Fat Phobia and Da’Shaun Harrison’s Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness to understand more about that. Concepts like “overw*ight” and “ob*sity” were created to pathologize bodies based on shared size rather than shared symptomology or cardiometabolic profile. This has been largely architected and perpetuated by the weight loss industry. And while there is absolutely no shame in having a disease, simply existing in a higher-weight body doesn’t qualify, and the diet industry’s insistence that it does - and especially their use of “anti-weight-stigma” platforms to try to forward that message - harms and kills fat people.  

They want to find a way to make fat people thin and stop future fat people from existing

Weight stigma is so ubiquitous in our culture, that someone can publicly espouse the notion (in various nomenclature) that the world would be better without fat people in it, and still be considered (and booked!) as an expert on ending weight stigma. It is impossible to fight a “war on ob*sity” without waging war against fat people, and wars, inevitably, have casualties.

You cannot be invested in pathologizing and eradicating fatness and also be effective at reducing the stigma against fat people, they are mutually exclusive.

There are some people who produce research about weight stigma whose results can be helpful from a harm reduction perspective , even though they, themselves, and their research are still coming from a place deeply rooted in weight stigma. Still, the truth is that nobody who is pathologizing fatness is a qualified expert on ending weight stigma.

For more on this, I’ve also created a handy guide to whether marketing/PR is anti-weight-stigma or just diet industry propaganda. You can find that here.

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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’s Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness for more on this.