weight stigma

Thinking Critically to Move Forward: Reflections on the International Conference on Eating Disorders 2016

Andrea 9 Comments

For those of you who follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed that I was at the International Conference on Eating Disorders (ICED), the major yearly conference put on by the Academy for Eating Disorders, over the past few days. As I write this post, I am sitting in the San Francisco Airport trying to synthesize my experiences into what may or may not turn into an epic blog post.

Despite my extreme extroversion on the Internet, I actually live in a funny place where I’m continually balancing my innate criticality and training as critical health psychology graduate student with the desire for folks to like me. I see this playing out at conferences like ICED, where people’s opinions of me and my fitness to do this work matter. I am unable to sit in a session and not voice my perspectives on Twitter, but I’m also continually filtering … Continue reading →

Reflections on the Weight Stigma Conference 2016

Andrea 1 Comment

I’ve set myself a bit of an unrealistic conference schedule this year; with that in mind, I thought that if I’m going to write conference recaps at all, I had better do them immediately. Otherwise, I’m likely to forget where I heard a little gem or misattribute some brilliance – can you think of anything worse than misattributed brilliance? (I’m sure you can.)

This week I had the pleasure of attending the 4th annual Weight Stigma Conference in Vancouver, BC. As I write this, I’m still sitting staring at the beautiful mix of mountains and beaches that makes Vancouver a spectacular place to conference. I was also – in the interest of full disclosure around my largely positive views of the conference – on the organizing committee for the conference. I will say, though, that I don’t think my opinion would be different had I not had some say … Continue reading →

Whose Weight Are You Watching? Schools, Surveillance, and Eating Disorder Prevention

Andrea 2 Comments

Health class in school is an experience few of us would like to repeat, I’m sure. Though it’s been a good many years since I was subjected to the joys of health education, I continue to think about the types of lessons I had, particularly about eating disorders, and how lacking these were. I can only imagine that things have gotten progressively worse with the focus on the “obesity epidemic” that is so pervasive today.

In one of my favourite articles ever, Pinhas et al. (2013) outline some issues with healthy curricula related to “healthy eating” in schools in the wake of obesity rhetoric. These include:

  • The simplistic “energy in, energy out” message can be highly problematic for some children, who may take this to mean they need to engage in restrictive behaviours
  • Without addressing weight stigmatization in schools, messages about health hold little purchase, and tend to
… Continue reading →

Reflections on the Weight Stigma Conference 2015

Andrea 6 Comments

This past week I had the opportunity to attend the third annual Weight Stigma Conference (WSC) in Reykjavik, Iceland. I lived Tweeted throughout, as did some others, so if you’re interested in seeing the social media from the conference I recommend checking out the #StigmaConf2015 hashtag on Twitter. A few people asked if I would blog about the conference, and I’m more than happy to do so! If you’re not a fan of conference recap blogs, stay tuned for our regular Science of EDs programming soon.

Overall, I thought this conference was fantastic. Though it was not a conference strictly geared toward eating disorders, weight stigma is not helpful for anyone in any kind of body and engaging in any kind of behaviours around food and exercise. It oversimplifies complex issues, makes body management a personal issue with strong political stakes, and reduces eating disorders and obesity to a binary … Continue reading →