Implicit Weight Bias Is a Major Problem in Our Society — And It's Getting Worse
Throughout 2021, Good Housekeeping will be exploring how we think about weight, the way we eat, and how we try to control or change our bodies in our quest to be happier and healthier. While GH also publishes weight loss content and endeavors to do so in a responsible, science-backed way, we think it’s important to present a broad perspective that allows for a fuller understanding of the complex thinking about health and body weight. Our goal here is not to tell you how to think, eat, or live — nor is to to pass judgment on how you choose to nourish your body — but rather to start a conversation about diet culture, its impact, and how we might challenge the messages we are given about what makes us attractive, successful, and healthy.
Sometimes it’s blaring and obnoxious, like Bill Maher calling for a return to fat-shaming (supposedly in the name of public health); or the tenured professor who tweeted that “obese” applicants need not apply for Ph.D. programs (a doctorate requires discipline, which fat people, according to him, do not have); or simply the woman next to you on the train loud-whispering into her cell phone that she’s being squished.
But often, fatphobia is less overtly mean, and is instead cloaked in concern for the "fat" person: Your mom clipping articles about how being at a higher weight causes worse COVID-19 complications (it’s actually more complicated than that); sometimes it looks like unsolicited suggestions to exercise or subtle weight-loss advice (a relative told me a friend of hers likes to dramatically put her fork down and exclaim, “Oh, I’m so full, can you believe the portions here?” in an obvious attempt at modeling "healthy habits"). Or fatphobia can come out as the classic microaggression, “You have such a pretty face.” (The unspoken part: “The rest of you? Not so much.”)
And sometimes, fatphobia and fat-shaming are so automatic — the salesperson crowing that a certain dress is so “flattering,” adding that it “gives you a waist,” or a server pointing out the “lite” options on a menu — that the behavior might not even consciously register to the person engaging in it. But it likely registers with the person on the receiving end, and it sends a message to anyone within earshot: Being in a larger body is something to be ashamed of, and it’s okay for other people to police it.
What is fatphobia, exactly?
Fatphobia is the fear and hatred of fat bodies. “That encompasses a whole bunch of things, namely weight bias and weight stigma, such as the idea we see people of higher body weight as lazy, and unintelligent, or disgusting,” says Mary Himmelstein, Ph.D., an assistant professor at Kent State University who studies how weight stigma affects people’s health. Fatphobia “perpetuates those negative stereotypes, and that can lead to discrimination against people with higher body weight,” she says.
Author Virgie Tovar puts it even more plainly. “Fatphobia is a form of bigotry and a form of discrimination that says that people of higher weight are inferior physically, intellectually, morally and health-wise,” says Tovar, who is the host of the podcast The Rebel Eaters Club, which is all about “breaking up with diet culture.” “It’s also the attitudes and behaviors that cluster around that system of beliefs,” she says.
Why does fatphobia exist?
A whole host of factors fuel fatphobia, so it’s complicated. A few contributors: Historically, “body weight is seen as a representation of wealth and class,” says Himmelstein. “In times when food is scarce, weight is seen as a positive.” Like the round-bellied Monopoly Man, a bigger body used to mean that you could afford to keep your family pleasingly plump and living on Park Place.
These days, for people living on lower incomes, food may be available but the most accessible and affordable options are calorie-dense and processed. “Thin is now considered upper class,” says Himmelstein, signifying that you have lots of spare time to think about what you eat, prepare food and exercise, and ample funds to buy fresh, whole, non-processed foods.
Tovar says it’s also about social control. “There’s this belief that if you diet or you eat a certain way, you can control your health and that you can control how long you are going to live,” she says. This is not true, which is hard for people to accept, especially those who aren’t aware of the misinformation diet culture perpetuates. “Even though there’s more and more evidence that we are largely not in control of our body size, people see higher weight people as refusing to take care of themselves. That refusal to ‘step up’ and claim control over your body and health is considered really negative. Americans see it as an insult to the ideology of being an American.”
Indeed, with our individualistic, boot-strapping way of looking at the world, Americans have been taught to believe that if we try hard enough, anything is possible. When people see someone who they believe isn’t taking charge of their health destiny, by “failing” to control their body size, it is betrayal of everything they’ve been taught, Tovar says, so it offends. “The whole group is allowed to punish the individual — it’s nonsensical and anti-scientific. That’s the thing about bigotry. It’s not logical.”
What are the dangers of fatphobia?
The harmful effects of fatphobia are a constant for people in larger bodies. “It is more intense against women,” says Tovar, who adds that most of the data on the subject is based on the male/female binary. “We are more likely to see positive examples of high-weight men than women in the media.” (Ahem, where is the positive equivalent of the “dad bod” for women?)
An just as with other forms of bias, being a member of more than one marginalized group leaves people subject to more harm. “Higher weight people of color definitely face dual stigmatization that can compound not only things like the wage gap and medical discrimination, but there seems to be correlations with being larger-bodied and being targeted by police — especially for Black and Hispanic men and boys,” Tovar adds. (Research also shows that people perceive Black men as larger, and hence more threatening than white men of the same height and weight.)
But like any form of bigotry, it does no one, no matter their weight, any favors. “It’s the same thing with racism and homophobia — fatphobia isn’t good for anyone. Nobody wins, even if you feel ‘safe’ from it,” says Tovar, who authored the book The Self-Love Revolution: Radical Body Positivity for Girls of Color.
Put aside for just a sec that you can't know someone's health status by observing their body size. Whatever the intention of the person pointing out that someone has put on a few pounds or maybe shouldn’t be eating that [fill in the blank], research shows that this kind of “helping” doesn’t help — quite the opposite.
“We know that experiencing weight stigma is associated with higher levels of anxiety, depression, poor body image, poor self-esteem,” says Tovar. “A lot of people think being critical of someone’s body will help motivate them to change it, but the effect is 180 degrees from that.” In fact, shame lowers motivation to exercise, and weight discrimination has been found to be positively associated with binge eating and increased caloric intake.
Like other forms of discrimination, fatphobia causes harm in multiple ways. Below are some examples of how people in bigger bodies have been shown to be harmed by fatphobia.
Women earn less as they gain weight. In one study that looked at how body weight affects people’s earning potential, researchers found that for American women, gaining weight predicted lower salaries — to the tune of almost $10,000 lower for heavier women, and close to $19,000 for very heavy women. One paper from Vanderbilt University Law School found that women categorized as “obese” were more likely to work in lower-paying, physically demanding jobs, such as elder care or food prep. “There’s this idea that plus-size people are sedentary or lazy. In actuality, plus-size people get funneled into more physical jobs,” says Tovar.
Women seen as fat get poorer medical care. “When you come into the doctor as a higher-weight woman, if your complaint could be related to your body weight, that’s what it will often be assumed to be,” says Himmelstein. In other words, doctors are more likely to decide that your issue may be solved if you try harder to lose weight, perhaps at the expense of doing the tests to properly diagnose you, or even asking you questions that could lead to a diagnosis that has nothing to do with your weight.
While some in the medical community are working to combat fatphobia among practitioners, doctors — as members of our weight-obsessed society — are also subject to its biases. More often, research shows, fat women avoid the doctor altogether, because they have experienced fat-shaming in medical settings (for example: “providers’ contemptuous, patronizing, and disrespectful treatment, lack of training, ambivalence, attribution and assumptions about patients’ weight and health,” according to the study), which can mean health problems are caught later, when they are harder to treat.The stress fatphobia creates may lead to more illness. In fact, says Himmelstein, women who experience weight stigma are more likely to have a number of chronic conditions, compared to women of the same weight who have not reported those experiences. In other words, it’s not body fat, but “the fatphobia itself is linked to an increased disease burden and mortality,” she says. This could be due to the physiological stress of living with discriminatory obstacles and persistent shame. “Stress affects our whole system over time,” says Himmelstein.
The physical effects of fatphobia are particularly dangerous, says Himmelstein, if you internalize the idea that you’re worth less because you’re heavy. “Devaluing yourself because of your body weight appears to be a larger concern for health,” she says.It can cause depression and anxiety. “The lived reality of a higher weight person is often one of shame and pain,” says Tovar, who identifies herself as fat. Even with her high degree of body acceptance, “I still know that any time I leave my house, I am open to someone being verbally abusive to me because of my weight.” Tovar has been an activist against size-based bigotry for years. “But there are moments it sideswipes me. It destroys people.”
Fatphobia and weight stigma are not getting better
Recent research can tell us a lot about people's biases and attitudes about marginalized people. A 2019 study that analyzed 4.4 million tests of implicit and explicit bias in order to examine changes over time in people’s attitudes about body weight — along with sexual orientation, race, skin tone, age and disability — found that in the course of a decade, attitudes about most of these social groups improved, tending toward neutrality. But while explicit bias toward people who are “overweight” has decreased, and all the other implicit biases studied had either improved or remained stable, implicit weight bias increased by 40% between roughly 2004 and 2010.
“Basically what they found is that for most of the other attitudes we think of as prejudicial, those toward people in bigger bodies are not actually changing, or are even going up,” says Himmelstein. Implicit bias (when you may not even be conscious of your preference) especially, seems to be getting worse. This may be partly because weight bias is often wrapped in concern. “The way we express it is usually, ‘I’m just trying to help you out.’ We see it as more acceptable,” she says.
How to fight fatphobia
Standing up to fatphobia can take many forms, and people who bear the brunt of fatphobia may choose to clap back, or may not want (or be able) to voice their feelings directly. And that’s okay, says Tovar. “There is no wrong answer when it comes to taking care of yourself.”
For her part, after years fighting fatphobia personally and professionally, Tovar has come to see both the perpetrators and those harmed as people who need to be met with compassion. “It sounds a little ‘woo,’ but for people who are still actively engaging in fatphobia, they are wounded. They don’t see that they have a wound, or they haven’t worked through the wound,” she says, but are acting out of hurt all the same. This way of looking at it "helps me to have compassion for myself. It’s a long haul process," says Tovar.
Below, a few things you can do to fight fatphobia in your world.
Drop the diet talk. So much of our everyday bonding chatter involves food, weight, diet trends and the like, which contributes to a diet culture mentality. “One of the first things we all need to do, call a moratorium about talking about food constantly,” says Tovar. Fatphobia is especially rampant in the workplace. “There are people talking about their weight loss, their diets, what they’re going to do at lunch, ‘these chips are so evil,’ kind of thing. And it’s fine, whatever your perspective is, but people need to keep more of those things to themselves.” That’s also because all this food and diet talk doesn’t only affect people in bigger bodies. “You don’t know who in the room has an eating disorder, for instance, so you don’t know who you’re causing harm to,” Tovar says, adding that thin people as well as fat people struggle with food issues, and weight talk can be triggering.
Don’t comment on people’s bodies, positively or negatively. Even an intended compliment can perpetuates the idea that being in a bigger body is bad and may be hurtful to people in larger bodies. “Did you lose weight?” isn’t another way of saying, “Wow, you look beautiful.”
Keep unsolicited “health” advice to yourself. It doesn’t matter if it comes from a place of concern — it’s impolite, causes more harm than good, and besides, it may not be relevant. “Just because you know someone’s body size or weight doesn’t mean you know anything about their health,” says Himmelstein. “People assume if you’re at a high weight you are unhealthy, and that’s just not accurate. [You] can have someone with lower body weight who has high cholesterol or blood pressure, and someone who is heavier may be in great physical shape. That’s the thing we need to remind ourselves about over and over again.”
Besides, you’re not giving a person in a bigger body information she doesn’t already have, says Tovar. “Many higher-weight people are chronically dieting, feel terrible about eating and are trying to lose weight,” she says. “You have no idea what is going on with that person, who may already be stressed out and dealing with discrimination.” And beside the besides, the vast majority of the time, someone else’s health — good or bad — is not up for discussion, unless that person invites you in.Speak up if you can. Whether you’re the person at whom the fatphobia is directed or a bystander, assess the situation and consider calling it out or otherwise offering your support to the person being harmed. It’s also more than okay to set personal boundaries, even if the person speaking says they’re “just trying to help.” “It’s okay to say, ‘Those comments are not helpful, and I would like to not talk to you about my weight again,’” says Himmelstein.
Audit your life. Especially if you’re internalizing fatphobia and it’s making you feel bad about yourself, go over what you’re watching, reading, clicking on. “Take a look at who you are interacting with, daily, weekly, who has an impact on your life,” advises Tovar. “Do that with people, social media, media — ask yourself, what is coming into my brain, who is impacting my heart, what and who are the things that are shaping the way I think of myself?” It can be helpful to write down when you encounter something or someone who makes you feel bad about your body. And then “unfollow” or dial back on those things, while focusing on what lifts you up.
Talk back to yourself. “It takes a lot of work for women who have been taught to hate our bodies to think and feel differently,” says Himmelstein. It may feel silly at first, she says, but when you catch yourself speaking unkindly to yourself, literally tell yourself what you want to come to believe, such as that your body deserves respect, that it is beautiful, functional, capable. If you are exercising, do your best focus on fitness goals and how movement makes you feel, rather than your weight.
Don’t assume that fat people are failed thin people. “Your body is the size that it’s supposed to be,” says Tovar. “Fatness is not a deviation from a natural and 'normal' state — there have always been fat people, there will always be fat people.”
You Might Also Like
