Weight Loss Sales Pitches Are Not Informed Consent Conversations

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One of the disturbing things fat* people experience when working with healthcare providers is aggressive sales pitches for weight loss interventions. These can occur either because the healthcare practitioner believes that weight loss will improve health generally, or that it will treat some health issue (that thin people also get) specifically.

In these conversations, whether they are peddling diets, drugs, or surgeries, healthcare practitioners wax poetic about weight loss with grand promises of how it will improve everything from our physical health to our romantic prospects. Sometimes we are given glossy brochures or shown videos of “success stories.” What we often aren’t given is any information about things like success/failure rates or risks.

And that’s not ok.

Doctors aren’t supposed to market dangerous interventions, drugs, and surgeries like they are LuLaRoe leggings. They are supposed to provide an opportunity for informed consent. This should include information like the failure rate of the intervention, the risks associated with it, and alternative options.

I’ve written about what would be required in terms of informed consent for weight loss interventions, drugs, and surgeries. Here are some quick tips to spot a healthcare practitioner who is selling instead of informing:

• They claim that weight loss will prevent/cure health issues that thin people also get.

• They fail to mention that weight loss fails the vast majority of the time.

• They claim that everyone who tries hard enough can lose weight and/or they justify the failure rate by blaming patients for intervention failures.

• They show you only “success stories” rather than a giving balanced perspective of the possible outcomes.

• They fail to discuss risks, including weight cycling, and/ or they minimize them.

• They claim that 5-10% weight loss creates clinically meaningful health benefits.

• They claim that weight loss is the only option for treatment/prevention. (This is never true.)

• I can’t even believe I have to type this but, sadly, it happens more often than you might think… if your healthcare provider is selling some kind of Multi-Level Marketing or commercial weight loss program that is a major red flag

• If they are board certified in “ob*sity medicine.” This typically means they are committed to believing that simply existing in a fat body is a pathology, and that they are willing to risk our lives and quality of life for any chance of making us even a bit thinner, so we have to remember that everything they tell us or recommend is through this filter.

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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.