How to Tell If A "Weight Bias" Training Is Diet Culture in Disguise

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As the diet industry works hard to co-opt the language of weight-neutral health and fat liberation and misuse it to sell weight loss interventions, I’m seeing more and more “anti-weight bias” trainings that are actually just diet industry marketing in disguise.

Sometimes the trainers are very aware of what they are doing, sometimes they are actually well-meaning but simply duped by diet culture. Regardless, this is especially dangerous since the attendees leave thinking that they’ve learned how to reduce or eliminate weight stigma, when in fact what they’ve learned is how to be uncompensated, unwitting marketers for the diet industry, increasing weight stigma in the process.

Here are some common red flags

The trainer is one or more of the following:

• Involved in “ob*sity medicine”

• Paid to sell/prescribe/provide weight loss interventions

• Taking payments from the weight loss industry

• Represents an astroturf organization like the Ob*sity Action Coalition, Ob*sity Society etc.

Taking the position that “I don’t want to stigmatize fat people, but I want to dedicate my career to eradicating them and making sure that no more ever exist” is not an anti-weight stigma stance.

You cannot be invested (ideologically or monetarily) in anti-fatness (aka anti-ob*sity) and be anti-weight stigma, they are mutually exclusive positions.

The training uses pathologizing/person first language

The words “ob*se” and “overw*ight” were literally made up to pathologize and medicalize higher-weight bodies. “Overw*ight” is inherently shaming (as it indicates that a body is “over” whatever is being considered a “correct” weight,) and “ob*se” comes from a Latin word that means “to eat until fat,” so much more stereotype than science there.

Person-first language (saying person with ob*sity, person affected by ob*sity, person with overw*ight etc.) does NOT come from weight-neutral health community or fat liberation community. It was co-opted from disability community (where it is controversial) by the weight loss industry in the service of their goal of declaring that simply existing in a higher-weight body (regardless of any measure or concept of health) is a “chronic lifelong health condition” (that requires their profit-driving interventions.) This is not about reducing stigma, it’s about increasing the bottom line of the weight loss industry.

The training suggests that weight loss is a solution for weight stigma

If they list bullying, lack of accommodation, or other types of weight stigma as a reason that people need access to weight loss interventions (including and especially drugs and surgeries) then they are inciting bias, not reducing it. While weight stigma is real and does real harm, and fat people are allowed to make whatever choices they want in dealing with it, in an anti-bias training it is wildly inappropriate to teach that oppressed people should have to change themselves (including risking their lives and quality of life with dangerous and/or expensive weight loss interventions,) to escape oppression. Teaching that oppressed people should change themselves to suit their oppressors is not an anti-stigma position. Even if someone believes that fat people are less healthy, healthism does not justify weight stigma.

If the curriculum is not focused on creating a world that fully affirms and accommodates fat people, then it’s likely diet industry propaganda.

They suggest that the “real” injustice is a lack of access to weight loss interventions

I’m seeing this more and more from people who work for/take payments from the weight loss industry. They try to claim that the true injustice and stigma is that some people don’t have access to their dangerous and expensive interventions. This has, actually, nothing to do with reducing weight stigma and, instead, is part of the weight loss industry’s long game to get their procedures covered by insurance, which will vastly increase profits.

Playing the Rename Game

There is definitely a place in anti-bias training for discussing language. However, if, instead of working to dismantle stigmatizing diet culture concepts, they are just renaming them (ie: instead of “willpower” use “commitment,” instead of “ideal weight” use “goal weight” etc.) then they are just repackaging diet culture.

Reducing bias isn’t about using different words for the same harmful concepts and practices, it’s about dismantling the biased paradigm and using words that create a new paradigm (instead of “ob*se” use fat/higher-weight, stop conceptualizing weight as ideal, healthy, a goal etc.)

They claim that the problem is that there isn’t enough anti-fat education

If they are claiming that healthcare practitioners and others should receive more education about pathologizing fat people and prescribing/recommending weight loss interventions, this is a weight loss marketing seminar, not an anti-bias training.  

NovoNordisk is involved

Having made (and continuing to make) a literal fortune from price gouging on insulin, NovoNordisk is bringing this same attitude (and the Perdue Pharma Oxycontin marketing playbook) to their weight loss drug Wegovy, which they promised their shareholders would be a massive profit-driver. I wrote more about this here. You can also check out this episode of the excellent podcast Untrapped during which I got to talk about this with the brilliant Louise Adams and Fiona Willer!

Their message is “don’t blame fat people, but do focus on eradicating them”

If they are only admitting the fact that weight isn’t a simple matter of calories in/calories out so that they can use that as a reason to promote diet drugs and weight loss surgeries then, again, you are not at an anti-stigma training, you are at a marketing seminar for the diet industry. (Even worse if they are acting like they just discovered this fact, when true anti-weight stigma and fat liberation activists have been screaming it from rooftops for literal decades.)

Bottom Line:

A true anti-weight bias/anti-weight stigma training de-pathologizes fatness and promotes a world that fully affirms and accommodates fat people. While there may be harm reduction models that fall short of this, if any of the red flags above are present, it tell me that I should do even more digging about who is creating/funding/providing this training, and who is profiting from the ideas presented.

Please feel free to put other red flags that you have noticed in the comments below.

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More Research

For a full bank of research, check out 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.