Eating Disorders

Weight Stigma Awareness Week

September 30, 2016

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A Certified Eating Disorders Registered Dietitian (CEDRD) with a master's degree in dietetics & nutrition. My passion is helping you find peace with food - and within yourself.

Meet Katy

Every year the Binge Eating Disorder Association promotes Weight Stigma Awareness Week, a week dedicated to increasing awareness, support and activism around the issue of weight stigma and both the individual and societal harm it is causing.  

"I've never been so humiliated as I was when I asked for a seatbelt extender on an airplane and the flight attendant called for it over the intercom.  This was after I already had to purchase 2 seats.  I never want to fly anywhere again."  

"The doctor told me I need to lose weight…I was there for strep throat."

"My son's school sent home a BMI report card saying he's overweight.  He's being bullied by his classmates and doesn't want to go to school."

"I always order the salad in public so that I look like the 'good fatty' who is trying to lose weight."  

Weight stigma impacts all of us.  People who have larger bodies are constantly being told that they aren't good enough, need to lose weight and are unhealthy.  And people who have smaller bodies live in perpetual fear of becoming 'overweight.'  In fact, 6 year olds report that they'd rather be hit by a truck than be fat.  The weight-loss industry makes over $60 billion a year by convincing us that we're too fat.

According to BEDA, weight stigma depends on 3 assumptions:

  1. Thin is always preferable
  2. Thin is always possible
  3. Thin people are better people

These assumptions are not only wrong – they are dangerous.  Rather than accepting the reality that bodies come in all sizes and shapes, and that this is inherently normal and beautiful, we assume that it is within one's control and thus one's responsibility to be thin.  It's not.  

What if we took the money spent on diets – the food, programs, books, gadgets, coaching, pills, surgeries, doctors, supplements, shots, apps, devices, equipment, etc. – and instead spent that money on something a) meaningful, and b) effective?  We could make a meaningful impact on something that MATTERS and makes the world a better place.  

 

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