Sizeism is a Health Hazard

Everyday Indignities: Using the Microaggressions Framework to Understand Weight Stigma

“…24 Chrisler and Barney noted indirect and direct effects on health as a result of barriers to care, describing indirect effects as those related to discriminatory attitudes and comments on the part of health care providers and the resulting impacts on experiences of and access to care (e.g., less trust in providers, delay in seeking care) and direct effects as more tangible barriers (e.g., physical environments that are not accommodating of fat bodies, denial of services due to weight). 25…”

“…their recent article on the direct and indirect impacts of sizeism on the health of fat individuals. 30 Though they did not incorporate a microaggressions approach, Seacat and colleagues used daily diary assessments, wherein fifty women, who fell into "overweight" or "obese" categories, kept records of every instance when they felt bullied or judged for their body size. 31 Their findings revealed a greater frequency of weight stigmatization than previously reported, with women noting an average of three incidents each day, and has implications for the importance of assessing the frequency of such instances.…”

“…44 Attending to the intersections of weight stigma with other forms of oppression is crucial, as "the intersection of body size with gender, race or ethnicity, class, disability, sexual orientation, and age, all of which are linked to at least occasional experiences of perceived unfairness, means that some fat people face a greater cumulative burden of discrimination, and hence higher stress levels, than others do." 45…”

A High-Risk Body for Whom? On Fat, Risk, Recognition and Reclamation in Restorying Reproductive Care through Digital Storytelling

“…Ideas about recognition are manifest in anti-oppressive literature about care work (Massaquoi, 2017;Brown, 2017). As yet, however, the impact of a practice of recognition has been largely minimised in relation to fatphobia, despite the pernicious and dangerous impacts of fat phobia on health care (Chrisler and Barney, 2016;Puhl and Brownell, 2006). The films in this project cast light on what might be required in order to successfully inject ideas of recognition into reproductive health care contexts.…”

“…A paradigm of recognition requires that service providers acknowledge that fatphobia, like all stigma, has its own health effects (Puhl and Brownell, 2006;Thille, Friedman and Setchell, 2017). Experiencing hatred and violence in daily interactions, limitations on employment, housing, educational and relationship opportunities, constant assumptions that fat people are lazy, unhealthy, ugly and vile-these impacts come at a cost to health (Chrisler and Barney, 2016), as do internalised weight stigma and fat phobia. Thinking through these internalised messages further emphasises the need for recognition, and for medical care to respect self-recognition and client expertise and-even more radically-to encourage service users to trust their own instincts.…”