Weight-based stigma and internalized weight bias can be particularly harmful to mental health, increasing risks of depressive symptoms, anxiety, and promoting lower self-esteem, social isolation, stress, and substance use.
Adults and children who experience weight-based stigma are more likely to avoid exercise and physical activity, and to engage in unhealthy diets and sedentary behaviors that increase the risk of worsening obesity.
Many healthcare professionals hold negative attitudes about obesity, including stereotypes that affected patients are lazy, lack self-control and willpower, are personally to blame for their weight, and are noncompliant with treatment.
Many healthcare facilities are inadequately equipped to treat patients with obesity.
There is evidence that quality of health care is adversely affected by weight-based stigma.
Fear of prejudice and internalized weight bias cause direct and indirect harm to patients with obesity, as they are less likely to seek and receive appropriate treatment for obesity or other conditions.
Despite the well-recognized risks of obesity and related illnesses, it is common for health insurance companies to have significant limitations or complete lack of coverage for evidence-based treatments of obesity—especially metabolic surgery. These policies can cause harm, are indefensible, and are ethically objectionable.
Some public health campaigns appear to embrace stigmatization of individuals with obesity as a means to motivate behavior change and achieve weight loss through self-directed diet and increased physical exercise. These approaches are not supported by scientific evidence, and they risk further increasing societal discrimination against people with obesity, yielding the opposite to the intended effect.
Stigmatizing public health campaigns that emphasize the role of personal responsibility and ‘healthy lifestyle’ choices focusing only on nutrition and physical activity overlook important societal and environmental factors that critically contribute to the epidemic of obesity.
Misconceptions about the causes of obesity are likely to play an important part in public support for obesity research and relative allocation of public funding, compared to other diseases that are believed not to depend on factors completely controllable by individuals’ actions (for example, cancer, infectious diseases, etc.).
Diseases such as obesity and type 2 diabetes receive far less research funding than do other chronic diseases, relative to their prevalence and the costs they impose upon society.
Weight-based stigma among healthcare professional is unacceptable, especially among those who are specialized in the care of people with obesity.
