Noom has announced the start of Noom Med, a division focused on selling diet drugs. If this sounds familiar, it’s because Weight Watchers just did the exact same thing . Let's talk about this. Get full access to Weight and Healthcare at weightandhealthcare.substack.com/subscribe...
In part 1 we started discussing the study “Working toward eradicating weight stigma by combating pathologization: A qualitative pilot study using direct contact and narrative medicine” by Rachel Fox, Kelly Park, Rowan Hildebrand-Chupp, and Anne T. Vo. We discussed the issues with existing weight stigma research and the approach that this study is taking. Today we’ll take a look at the study and its findings. Again, thank you so much to Rachel Fox for reviewing this before it was published! Get f...
I was thrilled to learn of a study by Rachel Fox, Kelly Park, Rowan Hildebrand-Chupp, and Anne T. Vo called “Working toward eradicating weight stigma by combating pathologization: A qualitative pilot study using direct contact and narrative medicine.” The study explains why research that seeks to end weight stigma cannot come from a pathologization of fatness. Thanks to Rachel Fox for reviewing my draft prior to publication! Get full access to Weight and Healthcare at weightandhealthcare.substac...
There is about a century of research showing that the most common outcome will be that people lose weight short-term and then regain it long-term as their bodies adjust to food restriction and change physiologically in order to become weight maintaining, weight regaining machines. Then there is deeply flawed research (often funded and/or conducted by the weight loss industry) that uses a number of methods to try to obfuscate the abject failure of these weight loss interventions. In all of this, ...
Two columns in the New York Times by "The Ethicist" (one where someone wants to comment on their friend's weight and behaviors and another where someone is concerned about the safety of weight loss drugs) show what happens when weight stigma meets staggering hypocrisy. Get full access to Weight and Healthcare at weightandhealthcare.substack.com/subscribe
Wow, did a lot of you write to me about this one. Someone wrote in to the New York Times column “The Ethicist” to ask if they should “intervene” because their friend, who specifically asked them not to talk to her about her weight, is fat and, in their perception, has health issues (which of course the letter writer blamed on her weight.) So obviously the answer was “you should stop monitoring your friend’s body size and thinking and writing about her in shame-drenched ways, respect her wishes, ...
I often get asked by practitioners what they can do to become better providers and advocates for their higher-weight clients. I conceptualize this as a four-step progression. Get full access to Weight and Healthcare at weightandhealthcare.substack.com/subscribe
In Part 1 I talked about Beachbody’s supposed rebrand to “Bodi” to focus on health. I signed up for the 14-day free trial to check it out myself. I was holding out hope that perhaps they really were moving away from their weight loss focus, but all of those hopes evaporated after two minutes of scrolling the site. Get full access to Weight and Healthcare at weightandhealthcare.substack.com/subscribe...
I recently got a question from reader Marisol asking “I have food and bee allergies, so I carry epipens. I just came across your writing about vaccine needles and it made me wonder about the needle on my epipen, should I be worried?” Let's talk about it. Get full access to Weight and Healthcare at weightandhealthcare.substack.com/subscribe
I’ve been contacted by a number of people wanting to know if I think that Beachbody’s rebrand to “BODi” really represents a commitment to weight-neutral fitness. I was hopeful at the start but, unfortunately that does not seem to be the case. It seems like they are, at best, paradigm-straddling and, more likely, co-opting the ideas of focusing on health and not size, but maintaining a platform of weight stigma and weight loss that will allow them to keep the diet culture dollars rolling in. Let'...
A tweet from a PhD Psychologist was brought to my attention and gives us a perfect example of what not to do if you don't want to harm fat people. Get full access to Weight and Healthcare at weightandhealthcare.substack.com/subscribe
Recently during Q&A after a talk about how to deal with weight stigma at the doctor’s office, one of the participants asked if I had any ideas for what to do when they were so sick of experiencing fatphobia from healthcare providers that they just wanted to not go. This is, unfortunately, a too-common situation. Here are some tips and techniques that can help you get the care that you deserve. Get full access to Weight and Healthcare at weightandhealthcare.substack.com/subscribe...
I don’t do a lot of guest posts here, but as I was reading Rachel Fox’s excellent piece “An Open Letter to the Well-Intentioned Medical Students Who Want to Do a Capstone Project on Weight Stigma and Email Me Asking For Advice” I knew I wanted to share it here. I reached out to Rachel who kindly agreed. Get full access to Weight and Healthcare at weightandhealthcare.substack.com/subscribe...
This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter ! If you like what you are reading, please consider subscribing and/or sharing! Recently I was made aware of something that was happening with the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) helpline. For the past twenty years, NEDA has run a helpline providing support to tens of thousands of people a year via text, chat, and phone. That helpline was recently replaced with an AI-driven chatbot. Investigating this I learned that it happened around a l...
Today we are breaking down Novo Nordisk's 2-year study of their weight loss drug, Wegovy. I want to thank Deb Burgard for her help with this piece. She is quoted and was kind enough to review and give feedback on the piece and I am incredibly grateful! Get full access to Weight and Healthcare at weightandhealthcare.substack.com/subscribe
The public comment period has opened for the US Preventative Services Task Force’s massively ill-advised draft research plan “Weight Loss to Prevent Ob*sity*-Related Morbidity and Mortality in Adults: Interventions” Here is the link to the plan text. Here is the link to comment (you can also go to the link above and click “leave a comment” in the last line of the yellow box at the top of the page) We have until June 14th to comment, please feel free to use anything I’ve written here for your com...
Today I’m looking into “New insights about how to make an intervention in children and adolescents with metabolic syndrome: diet, exercise vs. changes in body composition. A systematic review of RCT by Albert Pérez E, Mateu Olivares V, Martínez-Espinosa RM, Molina Vila MD, Reig García-Galbis M This is one of the studies cited by the disastrous American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines. Get full access to Weight and Healthcare at weightandhealthcare.substack.com/subscribe...
Jenny Craig has announced that they are shutting down. While I’m deeply sorry for the stress and unemployment it will cause for the employees who really believed they were helping people (because Jenny Craig told them they were,) as far as the program itself, I say good riddance to bad rubbish. Get full access to Weight and Healthcare at weightandhealthcare.substack.com/subscribe...
The entire idea of “ob*sity”* is problematic. It’s a made-up concept to pathologize bodies based on shared size rather than shared symptomology. It uses Body Mass Index (BMI) which is a math equation created with a racist basis . If your weight in pounds times 703 divided by your height in inches squared is 30 or more, you are “diagnosed” with “ob*sity.” This does not have the ring of sound science, but it gets worse. In this episode we're talking about the many issues with the "classes of "ob*s...
A very common issue for higher-weight people who are trying to access healthcare is healthcare providers (HCPs) who want to focus on weight and weight loss. Today I’ll give some tips that I’ve learned both from personal experience and as a patient advocate for navigating what I call Provider Weight Distraction. In this episode we look at options to get weight-neutral healthcare, even from HCPs dealing with PWD. Get full access to Weight and Healthcare at weightandhealthcare.substack.com/subscrib...
This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter ! If you like what you are reading, please consider subscribing and/or sharing! One of the ways that the diet industry is trying to squash the weight-neutral health and fat liberation movements is by using their money, clout, and enmeshment in the healthcare system to re-brand themselves as weight stigma experts, including at conferences, panels, and other events. This can be done by large weight loss industry representatives like the Ob*sity* Action ...
This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter ! If you like what you are reading, please consider subscribing and/or sharing! In my work around weight science and healthcare, I see a lot of confusion about, and misuse of, statistics. Today I thought I would point out the three of the most common issues that I experience. Sure, intentional weight loss fails 95% of the time, you just have to keep trying until you’re in the 5%. I know not everyone took statistics, but I did, so let me assure you tha...
This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter ! If you like what you are reading, please consider subscribing and/or sharing! In part 1 we talked about a request that has been submitted for the World Health Organization (WHO) to add diet drugs (specifically GLP1 agonists like Novo Nordisk’s Saxenda and Wegovy) to their list of “essential medicines.” We discussed who was making this request and the justification that they were using. In part 2 we took a deeper dive into the research that they used...
This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter ! If you like what you are reading, please consider subscribing and/or sharing! In part 1 we talked about a request that has been submitted for the World Health Organization (WHO) to add diet drugs to their list of “essential medicines.” We discussed who was making this request and the justification that they were using. Today we’re going to take a deeper dive into the research that they used to try to support this request, and in part three will look...
This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter ! If you like what you are reading, please consider subscribing and/or sharing! There are a number of different ways that bias can impact the healthcare that higher-weight patients receive. This includes provider bias and structural bias (when the healthcare system is created for thin bodies and/or to the specific exclusion of fat bodies.) Today I want to talk about what happens when these two types of bias intersect. It’s a perfect storm that both su...
This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter ! If you like what you are reading, please consider subscribing and/or sharing! In Part 1 we talked about how Novo Nordisk got suspended from The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry for their shady marketing practices. Today, we’re going to talk about an investigation by The Observer that found what so many of us have been saying for a looooong time - that Novo Nordisk had paid millions to prominent ob*sity “charities,” NHS trusts, univ...
This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter ! If you like what you are reading, please consider subscribing and/or sharing! If you have read this newsletter for any period of time, you’ve read my accounts of how pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk has been using extremely shady marketing practices (many taken from the playbook that Purdue Pharma used to push oxycontin) to promote their drugs for weight loss. Things like Putting doctors on their payroll to promote their drugs to the media withou...
Transcript This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter ! If you like what you are reading, please consider subscribing and/or sharing! Reader Marcel sent me the following question: I just got diagnosed with sleep apnea. My doctor told me that if I could just lose 5-10% of my body weight, it would go away. I’ve yo-yo dieted all my life and sometimes got to 5% lost before it came back, but never even got to 10% and most times I ended up heavier than when I started. I’m nervous to try again, but s...
This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter ! If you like what you are reading, please consider subscribing and/or sharing! In the early days of the pandemic studies were rushed out and highlighted in the media claiming that higher-weight people were at higher risk of COVID death. I wrote about the issues with this in my previous blog , as did Christy Harrison , Paul Campos and others. Now an umbrella review has been published. This is a review of existing systematic reviews and metanalyses. Qu...
This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter ! If you like what you are reading, please consider subscribing and/or sharing! EDIT 7/4/25: I’m excited to say that a project I’ve been working on is now live. The In Our Image Database from the Fat Legal Advocacy, Rights, and Education (FLARE!) Project is a listing of imaging sites that accommodate higher-weight patients. You can search the database, add to it, and/or volunteer to help expand the project! Finding out that you need an x-ray, MRI, CT ...
