Weight and Healthcare

Share this post

The Research Post

weightandhealthcare.substack.com

The Research Post

Ragen Chastain
Jun 18, 2022
17
Share this post

The Research Post

weightandhealthcare.substack.com

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

I often refer people to the resource and research list of the HAES Health Sheets, which is a project I co-created with Dr. Louise Metz and Tiana Dodson. In addition to the list, the sheets are diagnosis-specific, weight-neutral practice guides for practitioners, patients, and advocates. I recently got a request from a reader to create a post here with the research list that they could send people to, so here it is. This will be a living page that I update as new resources come out. If there are studies you feel are missing, please don’t hesitate to let me know! It’s divided into two sections, support for weight-neutral care and issues with weight loss/dieting as a healthcare intervention.

Content note: Many of these studies are written from a weight-centric paradigm, using terms that pathologize body size, and advocate for the eradication of fat people.

Support for Weight-Neutral Care

Evaluating the Evidence for a Paradigm Shift
Lindo Bacon, Lucy Aphramor
https://nutritionj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1475-2891-10-9
This paper evaluates the evidence and rationale that justifies shifting the health care paradigm from a conventional weight focus to a weight-neutral focus.

Size acceptance and intuitive eating improve health for ob*se* female chronic dieters
Lindo Bacon, Judith S Stern, Marta D Van Loan, Nancy L Keim
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15942543
HAES approach resulted in improved health risk indicators

Relationship Between Low Cardiorespiratory Fitness and Mortality in Normal-Weight, Overweight, and Ob*se Men
Ming Wei, MD, MPH; James B. Kampert, PhD; Carolyn E. Barlow, MS; et al
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/192035
Relative risk of all-cause mortality was similarly mitigated by fitness, regardless of BMI

Healthy Lifestyle Habits and Mortality in Overweight and Ob*se Individuals
Eric M. Matheson, Dana E. King and Charles J. Everett
https://www.jabfm.org/content/25/1/9.abstract?etoc
Healthy Habits were associated with a similarly significant decrease in mortality regardless of BMI

Stigma in Practice: Barriers to Health for Fat Women
Jennifer A. Lee, Cat J. Pausé
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.02063/full
An exploration of barriers to healthcare for fat people, including structural and institutional policies, attitudes, and practices.

Recognizing the Fundamental Right to be Fat: A Weight-Inclusive Approach to Size Acceptance and Healing From Sizeism
Rachel M. Calogera, Tracy L. Tylka, Janell L. Mensinger, Angela Meadows, Sigrun Daníelsdóttir
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02703149.2018.1524067
An exploration of issues with the Weight Normative Approach, the benefits of a Weight Inclusive Approach, and strategies for therapists to align their practice with a Weight Inclusive Approach

What’s wrong with the ‘war on ob*sity?’ A narrative review of the weight-centered health paradigm and development of the 3C Framework to build critical competency for a paradigm shift. 
Lily O’Hara and Jane Taylor 
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2158244018772888
Critique of the weight-centered health paradigm and review of the literature around the ineffectiveness and harms of the weight-centered approach. 

The weight-inclusive versus weight-normative approach to health: evaluating the evidence for prioritizing well-being over weight loss
Tracy L Tylka, Rachel A Annunziato, Deb Burgard, Sigrún Daníelsdóttir, Ellen Shuman, Chad Davis, Rachel Calogero
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4132299/
Review of the data on weight and health, including ineffectiveness and harms of dieting, health effects of weight stigma, and data behind a weight-inclusive approach.

Ob*sity treatment: Weight loss versus increasing fitness and physical activity for reducing health risks
Gaesser and Angadi
https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(21)00963-9
Makes the case for weight-neutral care over intentional weight loss

The body politic: the relationship between stigma and ob*sity-associated disease
Peter Muennig
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2386473/
Examines the relationship between weight stigma and health issues, and finds that weight stigma may drive health issues that are typically blamed on body size.

I Think Therefore I Am: Perceived Ideal Weight as a Determinant of Health
Peter Muennig
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2253567/
Found that the difference between actual and desired body weight was a stronger predictor of physical and mental health than body mass index (BMI) 

Issues with Weight-Loss/Dieting as a Healthcare Intervention

Validity of claims made in weight management research: a narrative review of dietetic articles
Lucy Aphramor
https://nutritionj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1475-2891-9-30
The best available evidence demonstrates that conventional weight management has a high long-term failure rate. The ethical implications of continued reliance on an energy deficit approach to weight management are under-explored.

How effective are traditional dietary and exercise interventions for weight loss?
W.C. Miller
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10449014
The data that exists suggest almost complete weight regain after 3-5 years

Medicare’s search for effective ob*sity treatments: diets are not the answer
Traci Mann, Janet Tomiyama
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez/17469900
Almost all dieters regain all the weight, many regain more

Long‐term Effects of Dieting: Is Weight Loss Related to Health?
Traci Mann, Janet Tomiyama
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/spc3.12076
Dieting was not shown to be correlated with improved health outcomes.

Probability of an Ob*se Person Attaining Normal Body Weight: Cohort Study Using Electronic Health Records
A. Fildes et. al
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4539812/
The annual probability of achieving normal body weight was 1 in 210 for men and 1 in 124 for women with simple ob*sity. The probability declined with increasing BMI category

Did you find this post helpful? You can subscribe for free to get future posts delivered direct to your inbox, or choose a paid subscription to support the newsletter and get special benefits! Click the Subscribe button for details:

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

Share this post

The Research Post

weightandhealthcare.substack.com
Comments
TopNewCommunity

No posts

Ready for more?

© 2023 Ragen Chastain
Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start WritingGet the app
Substack is the home for great writing