Obesity and Body Shaming

You may have seen a previous blog post about Body Shaming. For those of you who don't know, body shaming, weight shaming, or fat shaming, is discriminating based on someone's weight and size. This discrimination can take the form of direct criticism, belittling blog posts, trying to influence what sized people can shop at a store, excluding those of a certain BMI from participating, or even prejudging a person's character or work ethic because of size and shape. Body shaming can be directed towards others or ourselves. A study was recently released that investigated the consequences of fat shaming.

This study investigated the association between becoming obese or remaining obese and perceiving themselves the victims of different types of discrimination. Experiencing weight discrimination was significantly correlated with becoming obese and remaining obese.

Data showing obesity correlated with discrimination over time.

Please note that some of the people became obese after experiencing perceived weight discrimination. There might be something of the Pygmalion effect going on here: people tend to meet the expectations placed upon them whether by themselves or others.

I feel the findings from this study support the idea that we need to change our focus as a culture and as individuals. Our nation has a fat fixation, creating the need to manage and measure size. The danger as shown in this study is that focusing on body size through body shaming doesn't lead to less obesity in our society.

An important principle in business states:

"What gets measured gets managed - even when it's pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organization to do so."

Our culture has wrongly been measuring and managing appearance to assess the value of a person, and it has been harmful to our culture.

The change starts with ourselves. We must stop measuring our own worth by appearance. We must stop body shaming ourselves. Choose to not let size or appearance hold you back from doing things you have always wanted to do. Choose to start measuring your worth by your ability to love, serve, and meaningfully reach out to others. When you change the way you see yourself, let that change the way you see others. 

-Genevieve

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