BackgroundPeople living with severe obesity report high levels of weight-related stigma. Theoretically, this stigma undermines weight loss efforts. The objective of this study is to test one proposed mechanism to explain why weight loss is so difficult once an individual becomes obese: that weight-related stigma inhibits physical activity via demotivation to exercise.MethodsThe study focused on individuals who had bariatric surgery within the past 5 years (N = 298) and who report a post-surgical body mass index (BMI) ranging from 16 to 70. Exercise avoidance motivation (EAM) and physical activity (PA) were modeled as latent variables using structural equation modeling. Two measures of weight stigma, the Stigmatizing Situations Inventory (SSI) and the Weight Bias Internalization Scale (WBIS) were modified for people with a long history of extreme obesity for use as observed predictors.ResultsExercise avoidance motivation (EAM) significantly mediated the association between both experienced (SSI) and internalized (WBIS) weight stigma and physical activity (PA) in this population.ConclusionExercise avoidance motivation, influenced by weight stigma, may be a significant factor explaining the positive relationship between higher body weights with lower levels of physical activity.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s40608-018-0195-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Fat talk, or self‐disparaging talk about the body, is common among US women and increasingly reported for men. Despite its commonality, this unique genre of talk is difficult to access using traditional sociolinguistic methods both because it is brief and because it arises spontaneously in casual conversation. Here we present a new method of data collection accomplished by collaborating with citizen sociolinguists to collect spontaneous fat talk in public spaces. We compare fat talk exchanges captured by citizen sociolinguists against those collected in a vignette‐based discourse completion task. Our results show redundancy both in how fat talk is initiated and in the manner of the reply across both forms of data collection. However, the citizen sociolinguistic method produced greater variety in fat talk utterances, was less methodologically taxing, and revealed that fat talk occurs differently in same‐sex interactions than mixed‐sex ones.

Among-population patterns of diaphyseal variation are consistent with neutral expectations and are consistent with historical data on population composition, genetics, and migration. Furthermore, plasticity induced by Industrial-era levels of physical activity does not erase these neutral signatures. Diaphyseal variation may therefore be useful to infer neutral (presumably genetic) information across populations, and controlling for existing relationships may strengthen inferences of physical activity made when comparing limb bone structure across populations.