‘You Owe It to Yourself, Everyone You Love and to Our Beleaguered NHS to Get Yourself Fit and Well’: Weight Stigma in the British Media during the COVID-19 Pandemic—A Thematic Analysis

Abstract

The portrayal of obesity in the media can impact public health by guiding peoples’ behaviours and furthering stigma. Individual responsibility for body weight along with negative portrayals of obesity have frequently dominated UK media discourses on obesity. This study aims to explore how the media has represented obesity during the COVID-19 pandemic through a thematic analysis of 95 UK online newspaper articles published in The Sun, The Mail Online, and The Guardian. The first theme, lifestyle recommendations, accounts for media coverage providing ‘expert’ advice on losing weight. The second theme, individual responsibility, emphasises media appeals to self-governance to tackle obesity and protect the NHS during the pandemic. The third theme, actors of change, explores how celebrities and politicians are presented as examples of weight management. These results suggest that individuals are held responsible for their weight and accountable for protecting the NHS during the COVID-19 pandemic. Stigma can be furthered by the decontextualisation of lifestyle recommendations and exacerbated by the actors of change presented: Celebrity profiles reveal gendered goals for weight management, and politicians exemplify self-governance, which consolidates their power. In conclusion, individualising and stigmatising discourses around obesity have taken new forms during the pandemic that link health responsibility to protecting the NHS and invokes celebrities and politicians to foster action.

“Thin and muscular”: A cross-sectional mixed methods study of people’s descriptions of health.

“…Strengths of this study include the use of a community sample, a validated quantitative measure, and the use of qualitative data. We collected data during late summer of 2020, when weight-related messaging was pervasive throughout the United States and beyond (Carbone-Moane & Guise, 2021; Flint, 2020). However, we are unable to identify changes in the description of health due to the cross-sectional nature of data collection, and thus, this study illustrates the description of health at a single point in time during the COVID-19 pandemic.…”

“…Attributing weight with health during a period of increased awareness and problematization of weight status may be particularly harmful to health long term, creating a vicious cycle. While public health campaigns aim to promote weight loss to reduce the risk for COVID-19 and attribute weight status to personal responsibility (Carbone-Moane & Guise, 2021), as described by the COBWEBS model, stigmatizing messaging and experiences have negative impacts on health behaviors (Major et al, 2014; Tomiyama, 2014). Thus, changing the narrative surrounding health is essential to promote it, regardless of whether weight is considered as an aspect of health.…”

“…This has not occurred since the onset of the pandemic. Rather, the media has focused on “obesity,” providing lifestyle recommendations, individual responsibility, and highlighted celebrities as actors of change (Carbone-Moane & Guise, 2021; Flint, 2020); all of which have likely exacerbated the negative attributions of weight status in the media. This narrative is exemplified by the National Health Service (NHS) campaign to tackle “obesity,” which frames weight status as not only an individual-level obligation but directly connects weight to country-level health.…”

“…Thus, to promote health, it is imperative to understand how health is described, particularly as attention to weight status may have increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. Increased attention to weight status during the COVID-19 pandemic may have occurred as “obesity” has been identified as a potential risk factor for COVID-19 severity (Cai et al, 2021), frequent media attention to “obesity” (Carbone-Moane & Guise, 2021), and the emergence and proliferation of the quarantine15 hashtag (based on the “freshman 15” and beliefs of inevitable weight gain due to quarantine) on social media (Lucibello et al, 2021; Pearl, 2020).…”

Book review: Brookes, G. & Baker, P. (2021) Obesity in the news: language and representation in the press

“…As a pressing public issue, obesity has become a mainstay in the media. While there has been a growing body of research on media coverage of obesity (e.g., Atanasova & Koteyko, 2017;Carbone-Moane & Guise, 2021), research presented in this book sets itself apart from the other studies in three ways. Firstly, its large-scale and recent media data (36 million words covering a decade of obesity coverage between 2008 and 2017 in the whole UK national press), secondly, its linguistic approach through the methodological synergy of corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis and, thirdly, its diverse analytical themes, including the comparisons between newspapers (Chapters 2 and 3), diachronic changes observed in the data (Chapter 4), highlighting the individualising discourse around obesity (Chapters 5 and 6), different perspectives on obesity representations including that of gender and social class (Chapters 7 and 8), and the readers' online comments (Chapter 9).…”