Status Updates From “You Just Need to Lose Weig...

Research shows that these exchanges [social negative body talk] make us feel worse. Such talk creates greater body dissatisfaction.

“The office break room, a dressing room, and meals with friends all become sites for expressing discontent with our bodies. I hate my thighs. I’m not swimming, nobody needs to see me in a bathing suit. U look amazing, I look terrible! Comments like these abound, often seen as a way of blowing off steam, releasing the disappointment we feel about our own bodies, & hopefully making us feel better in the process.”

“Implicit bias powers what psychologists call ‘Normative Discontent’, the idea that people socially express bodily dissatisfaction, especially with regard to their weight. This is buttressed by a series of powerful social scripts to which many of us have become accustomed: voicing disapproval of our own bodies and expecting others to do the same.”

“Whether we mean to or not, most of us have learned to stigmatize fatness and that stigma often translates to both personal dislike of fat people and promotion of explicitly anti-fat rhetoric and policies.”

“A 2013 study found that when presented with a fat woman defendant and a thin woman defendant, thin men on juries were more likely to believe fat women were guilty and that those fat women would reoffend.”

Having mixed feelings about this book.
Binary between fat/thin people continually used, but no true definition for what either mean. What does it mean to be thin? What does it mean to be fat? If the BMI is to be ignored (super valid), then what are we basing these allegations on?

Also, use of “we” when speaking about fat people conveys a personalized tone, but doesn’t bode well w/the science based approach.

“They found that Anti fat bias wasn’t correlated to income, ethnicity, gender, or personal history of being the targets of anti-fat comments or treatment. Anti gayness was correlated to body size, thinner participants were more likely to express harsh judgments about fat people and to exhibit higher levels of explicit anti-fat bias.”