Weight and Healthcare

with Ragen Chastain•weightandhealthcare.substack.com

Examining the intersections of weight science, weight stigma, and healthcare and what evidence, ethics, and lived experience teach us about healthcare and public health best practices for higher-weight people.

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Episodes

New Guidelines for Weight Loss Surgery?

This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter ! If you appreciate the content here, please consider supporting the newsletter by subscribing and/or sharing! In October, “Guidelines on Indications for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery” were put out. While I don’t think that these surgeries meet the requirement for ethical, evidence-based medicine , in looking at these guidelines specifically, here are some things that I think it’s important to know. The guidelines were put out by The American Societ...

Nov 23, 2022•9 min

Advocating for Blood Pressure Cuffs and Gowns in the ER

This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter ! If you appreciate the content here, please consider supporting the newsletter by subscribing and/or sharing! Note: I have explicit permission to share this story. I wanted to share it to help those who work within healthcare to see ways that they can make change, and those who do not work in healthcare to see how they might advocate. A call came in late at night. It was a dear friend of mine and she was in the emergency room. Luckily it looked like ...

Nov 19, 2022•6 min

Weight Watchers Long-Term Research

This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter ! If you appreciate the content here, please consider supporting the newsletter by subscribing and/or sharing! In the last newsletter, I gave a general overview of Weight Watchers (aka WW) and all the tricks they use to sell a program that doesn’t work . Today I’m going to dig into the research. I started at Weight Watcher’s own “Science Center.” They pointed to two studies to back up their claim that “WW is one of the few programs that fulfills all o...

Nov 16, 2022•7 min

Weight Watchers - Up To Their Old Tricks

This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter ! If you appreciate the content here, please consider supporting the newsletter by subscribing and/or sharing! In 2018, Weight Watchers changed its name to “WW” added the tagline “wellness that works” and started using language about “health” and “wellness” and “beyond the scale.” Per a Fast Company article this happened because “In this new era of body image acceptance and feel-good wellness communities, Weight Watchers learned that the term “diet” w...

Nov 12, 2022•5 min

Are Medicare and Medicaid Patients Required to Weigh-In?

This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter ! If you appreciate the content here, please consider supporting the newsletter by subscribing and/or sharing! I hear from a lot of people who are on Medicare and Medicaid that they have been told that they are required to weigh in at their appointments or the services won’t be covered. This is a misconception. Medicare and Medicaid's Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) (Content note – link contains anti-fat language), does require physicians ...

Nov 09, 2022•3 min

Does This Study Really Show How To Maintain Weight Loss?

This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter ! If you appreciate the content here, please consider supporting the newsletter by subscribing and/or sharing! Reader Barbara sent me an article with the headline “How to Maintain Weight Loss, According to People Who Succeeded.” The article was about a study called “In their own words: Topic analysis of the motivations and strategies of over 6,000 long-term weight-loss maintainers” by Phelan et. al. (as always, I don’t link to research or articles tha...

Nov 05, 2022•8 min

Reader Question – What’s the Deal with Lark Health?

This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter ! If you appreciate the content here, please consider supporting the newsletter by subscribing and/or sharing! I have had several readers ask about the Lark program. In each case, it was being actively marketed to them, without their consent, by their insurance company and/or employer. Lark is, predominantly, a weight loss program that also bills itself as a “diabetes prevention” program and “mind body” health coaching all offered by an Artificial Int...

Nov 02, 2022•8 min

Is Being Fat Really a Chronic, Lifelong Health Condition?

I got this question recently: “I’ve been seeing articles that say that being fat* is considered a “chronic lifelong condition.” Can you explain what’s going on to me?” Get full access to Weight and Healthcare at weightandhealthcare.substack.com/subscribe

Oct 27, 2021•6 min

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