Obesity: an Empathy Blind Spot

I have to say, I don’t really respect fat people. It shows a weakness and a lack of self-control. I was a bit overweight myself and I managed to get myself back on track. Why can’t they?

Obesity is used in the public imagination to represent the moral decay of society - it embodies people's fears of what could happen if they "let themselves go." This collective blindness around the obesity stigma motivated our ethnographic research with people living with obesity (PLWO). By spending time with PLWO and seeing first hand the challenges, prejudices and difficulties they face, we found a major power imbalance between doctors and patients. PLWO fear judgment from the medical profession; they fear "wasting GPs' time", and they fear simply being told that they just need to get into the right mindset. The research called for more empathy towards PLWO across both the medical and wider social spheres.