There is absolutely no doubt that fat phobia is alive and well and thriving in our culture. The question is whether it has to take root in your mind and make you miserable. Do you even know of anyone who’s of higher weight and pays no attention to fat phobia? My guess is that you don’t and that’s one of the reasons you fall prey to it. So, let me introduce you to Shannon Walton who finally got tired of being bullied about her weight. “Battling obesity—and telling bullies to ‘Kiss it!’” tells her story and shows how she took charge of her life and fought back. Says Walton who lives in Sheffield, England, “I’ve always been overweight, from a very, very young age.” At 14 she was 196 pounds and at 15 she was 210. Later, she discovered that she had both premature adrenarche which made her develop early and...

Checking out after a medical appointment, I was trying to write a check on a (to me) high counter and remarked to the nurse that I wished I were taller. She said, “But you’re so tiny, so petite.” I replied to all 5 feet 1 inch of her—an attractive, slightly higher weight woman—"Well, you’re not exactly tall. There’s not much difference in our height.” Then came the kicker when she said, “Oh, no, but you’re thin. I wish I were thin like you.” Though I’ve had these conversations before, they still stun me and I never know what to say. There wasn’t much I could say with people around us and me being in a bit of a rush, so I said something like, “You look fine. Focus on your health, not your weight.” She looked at me like I was clueless about her situation, so I added, “I know about...

I get having concerns about what people think of you. Mine have lessened with age, but I swear I’ll be heading into the cremation oven—still wondering, “Do I look alright?” Self-consciousness for me is second nature coming from very looks conscious parents.  Now that we’re no longer children, though, it’s time to move toward becoming more comfortable with how we look. One way to do that is to understand that our discomfort is not based in the past. There are actually folks out there who weren’t made to feel bad about their particular hair/thighs/stomach/nose/chin/etc. and are walking around today not thinking much, if at all, about these body parts. Or maybe their whole family was higher weight and no one made a big deal about it. Though we can’t restart our lives in another family that doesn’t have “bad-body” issues, we can make changes in the present by paying attention to...

The actress Kate Upton once declared, “To me, what’s sexy is when you look like you’re having a good time.”  Many girls and women try to look like they feel sexy. They dress provocatively and carry themselves seductively. One girl wore pants to her therapy session with the word “juicy” scrolled in rhinestones on her backside, and another girl came to her session in four-inch stilettos.  But if you are happy in your body, you don’t need to turn it into a billboard advertising your wares. Authentic good body image comes from inner self-satisfaction.  Because the pain of body image dissatisfaction is emotional, we can improve our body image through psychological change. Making peace with body image distress and enhancing our self-acceptance involves a three-prong approach:  Awareness + Action = Acceptance  Awareness. Become aware of your unique triggers that make you feel bad about your appearance. Are there certain people, places, or situations that especially cause you unhappiness about...

I wonder if higher weight people are feeling more under siege than ever during the COVID-19 pandemic. I don’t mean because of heightened stress, feeling home bound, or battling with increased emotional eating, although they are all factors to be considered. I mean feeling under siege due to the comments of others about higher weight people being at greater risk for becoming seriously ill with the virus. If you’ve been on the receiving end of such comments, don’t for a minute let people shame you. I’m not going to go into numbers about the relationship between COVID and weight because that is besides the point. The point is that blaming higher weight people for “letting themselves get the virus” (one way I heard it put) is simply more weight stigma coming at ya. It’s infuriating for me to hear such remarks when week after week I sit with clients who are...

We’re all used to seeing successful people, mostly women, paired with low or average weights. This is what the media shows us, what society promotes as reality, and what we come to believe. But watching a documentary, Surge, on aspiring Democratic legislators, it dawned on me that some of these women were role models not only as females but as women who would be called “higher weight” in this culture and weren’t stuck sitting around telling themselves they couldn’t do this or that because of it. Actually, I’d had this thought when I first learned of Stacey Abrams, former member of the Georgia House of Representatives and candidate for Governor of Georgia. The fact that we notice other people’s weights at all in this country—never mind judge them for it—both drives me crazy and saddens me. But then I considered what it took for her as a Black woman in the...

Embrace: One Woman’s Journey to Inspire EveryBODY is an engaging, enlightening 2016 documentary, the story of Australian photographer, wife and mother Taryn Brumfitt who decides to stop hating her body. Here are quotes about the film that I hope make you want to see it. You can watch it on Amazon Prime, find the video on Apple iTunes, and check out the trailer at

.  From MEDA Inc. (I’m a former advisory board member): “The protagonist and director of the documentary, Taryn Brumfitt, struggled with her body image. After she had multiple children, she became obsessed with obtaining a ‘perfect’ post-pregnancy body as efficiently as possible. Even though Brumfitt spent years manipulating her body and weight in order to participate in a bodybuilding swimsuit competition, she eventually came to a life-changing realization after reaching her ‘goal’: ‘In my ‘perfect’ body, I’m not happy.’” After coming to peace with her body, Brumfitt decide...

Once upon a time, the world didn’t hate fat or fat people and dieting wasn’t a $72 billion US industry. Take yourself to an art museum or thumb through an art book (not modern) and see for yourself. Or read Ken Mondschein’s article, “Fatness and Thinness in the Middle Ages.”  To be sure, fat has been associated with greed, gluttony, excess, and other negative traits. However, he says, there were times when fat was viewed more positively: “So, too with foreign lands—the fictionalized John of Mandeville tells of how foreigners ate inordinate amounts, and the romancier Rusticello has Marco Polo report on the prodigious appetites of the mighty men of Zanzibar.”“There was no shortage of defenses of largeness, or even positive depictions, in the less well-born. Peasants rarely got enough to eat, so positive associations between fat and plenty—‘fat’ soil, the ‘fat’ of the land, and the pre-Lenten ‘fat Tuesday’ feast—are not surprising...

Off the top of your head, how connected are you to your body? I don’t mean to your appetite, but how synced you are with the pain and pleasure you feel in your entire corporeal self. Your disconnection is both a cause and result of dysregulated eating. The hopeful news is that, with practice, you can tap into sensing exactly how your body is feeling any time which will help you enormously in making wiser decisions about food. You do this by performing a body scan (“Oh, Hello There, Body” by Greater Good (11/26/19, Lion’s Roar, https://www.lionsroar.com/oh-hello-there-body/, accessed 2/1/20) in which “we systematically focus our attention on different parts of our body, from our feet to the muscles in our face.” The goal is to experience our body as is without doing anything to or for it and to find and relieve tension caused by stress.  You can do a scan...

Working on a new book, I’ve been struggling to find the best word to describe how I wish people with body shame would feel about their bodies. Helping clients feel better about their bodies is one of the most difficult parts of my job. As I’ve blogged previously, making peace with a body that you’ve hated for a long time takes some doing, but is crucial to becoming a “normal” eater and engaging in self-caring practices.  Many words are used to describe the positive feeling we want to have about our bodies and none seem quite right. One is “loving” your body. But, I understood when clients counter that saying they love something they don’t want feels inauthentic and like a lie. Another word is “accepting” your body. Clients’ objection has been not wanting to say “it’s okay” to something they want to change. Although I’ve tried to explain that we...

One of areas in which I get the most push back from clients is when I talk about body positivity. The idea of loving a large body which everyone in the world seems to hate is just too much to take in for many higher weight clients. It’s also difficult for people who would like to stop dieting and eat more “normally,” because of their terror of gaining weight and becoming like the people, fat, that is, that they’ve learned to hate.  If you’re in either group, Sonalee Rashatward, social worker and activist, has a message for you about substituting the quest for body love and acceptance with body neutrality. (“What We Can All Learn From the Fat Sex Therapist” by Alexandra Jones, https://www.phillymag.com/be-well-philly/2019/09/18/fat-sex-therapist/, Philadelphia, 9/18/19, accessed 9/20/19). While fighting fat phobia and weight stigma and many other prejudices, she makes the point that: “. . . those struggling to exist in...

Although I usually enjoy comedian Bill Maher’s humor on his show Real Time, I was appalled and disgusted at his misinformed fat shaming monologue in September. Just like “obesity,” fat shaming is a complicated subject and there’s no simple answer for it. But there are five reasons that it occurs.  Lack of civility People fat shame because we live in a highly uncivil culture where everyone thinks they have the right to say whatever they want to everyone else. Due to the advent of social media, very little is kept private anymore. There was a time (younger folks will need to trust me on this) that people, for the most part, kept their religious and political opinions to themselves. Of course, humans always have gossiped, but that was the point—it was done privately, one-to-one or in a small group, not blabbing our judgments to hundreds or millions of people. We say...

I have eyes, ears, a nose and a mouth that all are in decent working order. I proclaimed this aloud one night after waffling about whether I looked okay to attend an evening dance class of people I’ve known for years. My proclamation was my way of saying I’m done worrying about how I look. I really want to be free of this ridiculous pre-occupation. As I tell clients, sometimes we just need to get fed up with our own silliness. Especially as women, we need to stop our obsession with self-grooming. Because I don’t think in all-or-nothing ways, I’m not suggesting that we give up caring about our appearance. It’s fine to care but, as with eating, we need to be able to say when enough is enough.  We acquire this mistaken idea that we need to look a certain way from our personal family experience growing up and from...

Weight stigma may be more dangerous for higher weight people than carrying around a great deal of weight. Culturally generated, fat blaming and shaming have reached the heights of hysteria in this country. Whether you carry a higher weight or rigidly restrict food or purge in terror of weight gain, it’s crucial that you understand the health and mental health damage that internalized weight stigma poses.  Here’s a recent article I wrote for therapists on treating internalized weight stigma. (“Three Steps to Challenge Internalized Weight Stigma” by Karen R. Koenig, LCSW, M.Ed., https://www.socialworktoday.com/archive/exc_0719.shtml, accessed 7/12/19) As an eating disorders therapist, I treat many high weight clients. Some are 40 pounds heavier than they would like to be, while others weigh over 300 pounds. In either case—in fact, in most cases—clients who weigh more than the norm have internalized culturally-induced weight stigma which is damaging to both their physical and mental health....

Watch out for studies that predict “obesity.” There’s science on both sides of the question, but other issues to consider. One is a person’s reaction to what weight they’re predicted to be. Telling people that they’re genetically inclined to be of high weight, can backfire and cause them to throw up their hands and think “Why bother eating healthfully or exercising? I’m already doomed.” Moreover, shouldn’t we be focusing on health rather than weight, since people can be healthy at different weights?  Researchers such as Amit Khera of Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and his colleagues studying obesity prediction do so in the “hope that the score will help erase the stigma associated with obesity and shed some light on the biology behind the condition. Although people with high genetic risks may have a harder time avoiding weight gain or losing weight, they also might...

Many higher weight clients feel ashamed of their large bodies and what they perceive as their failed attempts to trim them down. However, some high weight clients don’t feel that way at all. They understand that a complex, partly random, combination of factors, including, paradoxically, their considerable and repeated efforts to lose weight through dieting, have contributed to their size. The difference between the two groups of clients is that one internalizes weight stigma and the other doesn’t. Weight stigma is the culturally-induced perception that being high weight is bad and that someone is bad because they are higher weight. According to the Binge Eating Disorder Association, weight stigma—aka weight bias or fat bias or weight-based discrimination—is discrimination, negative judgment, shaming or stereotyping based on a person's weight, size or shape. Such prejudice may happen in dating, health care, education, friendships, employment and in any aspect of life.  Such judgment is...

  I try not to wade into political waters on Facebook or in blogging, but Donald Trump has stepped onto my territory and my job of addressing weight stigma and fat-shaming. His comments at an August rally are perfect examples of fat bullying, groupthink, and the psychological defense mechanism called projection. Here’s what happened. Reports CNN, “At a 2020 campaign rally in New Hampshire on Thursday night, a protest broke out. A Trump supporter sought to remove the protesters. And as that was happening, the President of the United States yelled this into the microphone: ‘That guy's got a serious weight problem. Go home. Start exercising. Get him out of here, please. Got a bigger problem than I do. Got a bigger problem than all of us. Now he goes home and his mom says, 'What the hell have you just done?'” (“Donald Trump bullied a man as overweight, then didn't...

Whether you have pain that’s short-term, say a severe headache or a broken bone, or chronic and long-term, as can happen with fibromyalgia or neuropathy, you may be using food as a crutch to get you through the day. Being in pain can steer you toward the refrigerator in several ways, but you can learn not to let it do so—and improve your health at the same time. You may turn to unhealthy food: · For comfort from pain because you hurt badly and wish to feel better. Who could blame you for that? However, food is not meant for comfort, except occasionally. Especially if you’re suffering is ongoing, you may be telling yourself it’s okay to eat lots of sweets and treats because you feel so miserable. Or because life’s not fair. But, it’s not okay to mistreat your body when it’s already feeling awful. It’s far better to find...

“Self-objectification occurs when women view their bodies as objects, existing for the pleasure of others” and “… is associated with an increased risk of poor body image.” (Dryden, C., & Anderson, J., 2019. “The dark triad, trait-based self-objectification, and body image concerns in young women.” Personality and Individual Differences, 145, 1-8. DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2019.03.015, accessed 3/23/19) Another definition is that “Self-objectification occurs when individuals treat themselves as objects to be viewed and evaluated based upon appearance. (Chiara Rollero and Norma De Piccoli, “Self-Objectification and Personal Values: An Exploratory Study” (Frontiers in Psychology, 2017; 8: 1055, doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01055, accessed 3/23/19) Though self-objectification is primarily a problem for women based on society dictating that female beauty means having a certain shape and size, it’s also a problem for some men. It occurs not only due to approval-seeking and people-pleasing but to fear that others will shame or reject our bodies. When this fear grows overwhelming,...

Self-objectification is common among people who turn up in my office. It involves internalizing “an observer’s perspective” about ourselves. More specifically, body self-objectification is an unhealthy way of viewing our bodies through the values of others or of society. “Self-objectification is associated with increased risk of poor body image, depression, and eating disorders” and, when studied, “was most consistently and positively associated with neuroticism, perfectionism, and narcissism across multiple studies.” (Carrotte, E., & Anderson, J. R. (2018). “A systematic review of the relationship between trait self-objectification and personality traits.” Personality and Individual Differences, 132, 20-31. DOI:10.1016/j.paid.2018.05.015). Of the three traits listed above, neuroticism and perfectionism are the ones I see in most dysregulated eaters. Neuroticism is seen in a personality tendency toward guilt, shame, anxiety, self-doubt, and self-deprecation. Neurotic clients do a great deal of putting themselves down, feeling insecure about decisions, ruminating about the past, obsessing about the future, worrying...