Marilyn Wann takes on weight bias in healthcare in “Big deal: You can be fat and fit” on CNN.COM:
…People are telling their stories of weight bias in medical care on websites like First, Do No Harm, This Is Thin Privilege and Obesity Surgery Gone Wrong. The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance has been speaking out on behalf of fat people’s civil rights since its founding in 1969.
Health professionals of good conscience are joining this effort in increasing numbers. They’ve developed an approach called Health At Every Size that is proving to be better for people’s health than weight-loss attempts. The Health At Every Size professional organization,Association of Size Diversity and Health, this week launched the project Resolved, a response to New Year’s weight-loss resolutions. It invites people to share stories about weight discrimination in health care and opinions about what needs to change.
Weight bias has been documented among doctors, nurses, fitness instructors and other professionals on whom a fat person might need to rely for help. Last year, researchers who themselves are part of an anti-“obesity” institution (Yale’s Rudd Institute) surveyed medical professionals who specialize in caring for fat people and found that they had high levels of weight bias, viewing us as “lazy, stupid, and worthless.”
Paul Campos uses the latest “obesity paradox” study with “Our Absurd Fear of Fat” in The New York Times to argue that policing fat is worthless:
The study, by Katherine M. Flegal and her associates at the C.D.C. and the National Institutes of Health, found that all adults categorized as overweight and most of those categorized as obese have a lower mortality risk than so-called normal-weight individuals. If the government were to redefine normal weight as one that doesn’t increase the risk of death, then about 130 million of the 165 million American adults currently categorized as overweight and obese would be re-categorized as normal weight instead.
[…]
Now, if we were to employ the logic of our public health authorities, who treat any correlation between weight and increased mortality risk as a good reason to encourage people to try to modify their weight, we ought to be telling the 75 million American adults currently occupying the government’s “healthy weight” category to put on some pounds, so they can move into the lower risk, higher-weight categories.
In reality, of course, it would be nonsensical to tell so-called normal-weight people to try to become heavier to lower their mortality risk. […T]iny variations in relative risk in observational studies provide no scientific basis for concluding either that those variations are causally related to the variable in question or that this risk would change if the variable were altered.
Both articles are well worth reading, but I would skip the comments on those sites. If you must discuss with someone, chat about it here ;)
Living ~400lbs 
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