Angela Meadows

They experience stigma and discrimination in just about every aspect of daily life including healthcare, education, legal proceedings, personal relationships even going shopping is fraught with potential and actual negative experiences, the world is not a friendly place for fat individuals.

Common wisdom suggests that this could motivate them to change, but almost all the evidence points the other way, self stigma is associated with more binge eating, less frequent exercise, and so on.

Public health messages and the 'War on Obesity' aren't helping because they frame the fat individual as the villain, and media representations of fat people are almost entirely negative.