Weight Bias in Health Education

Weight stigma is so pervasive in our culture that it is often unnoticed, along with the harm that it causes. Health care is rife with anti-fat bias and discrimination against fat people, which compromises care and influences the training of new practitioners.
This book explores how this happens and how we can change it. This interdisciplinary volume is grounded in a framework that challenges the dominant discourse that health in fat individuals must be improved through weight loss. The first part explores the negative impacts of bias, discrimination, and other harms by health care providers against fat individuals. The second part addresses how we can 'fatten' pedagogy for current and future health care providers, discussing how we can address anti-fat bias in education for health professionals and how alternative frameworks, such as Health at Every Size, can be successfully incorporated into training so that health outcomes for fat people improve.
Examining what works and what fails in teaching health care providers to truly care for the health of fat individuals without further stigmatizing them or harming them, this book is for scholars and practitioners with an interest in fat studies and health education from a range of backgrounds, including medicine, nursing, social work, nutrition, physiotherapy, psychology, sociology, education and gender studies.

Heather A. Brown is the Assistant Director of the University Writing Center at the A.T. Still University College of Graduate Health Studies. She earned an MTS from Harvard Divinity School and an EdD in Adult and Higher Education from Northern Illinois University. Her research is focused on the connections between weight and learning and how to promote academic achievement in fat women in postsecondary education. Nancy Ellis-Ordway is a psychotherapist in private practice in Jefferson City, Missouri, with 30 years' experience; she specializes in treating eating disorders, body image issues, stress, anxiety, depression, and relationship issues. She earned a Master of Social Work degree from Washington University and has a Ph.D. in Health Education and Promotion from the University of Missouri.

1.Introduction- Documented Harm: How a Misguided Paradigm Hurts Fat People (and Everybody Else). Part I-When Healers Cause Harm 2.Deadweight: Unpacking Fat Shame in Psychotherapy 3.Medical Equipment: The Manifestation of Anti-Fat Bias in Medicine 4."Limited By Body Habitus": Fat and Stigmatizing Rhetoric in Medical Records 5."God forbid you bring a cupcake": Theorizing Biopedagogies as Professional Socialization in Dietetics Education 6.A Textbook Case of Bias 7.Why Would I Want to Come Back? Weight Stigma and Noncompliance Part II: Fattening Pedagogy 8.Raising Awareness of Weight-Based Oppression in Health Care: Reflections on Lived Experience Education as Emotional Labor 9.The Weight of Imaginative Resistance and Pedagogy for Narrative Transformation 10.What Counts as Good or Bad Writing About Weight: Reflections of a Writing Coach 11.Clinical Revulsion: Combatting Weight Stigma by Confronting Provider Disgust 12.Anti-Fat Bias in Evidence Based Psychotherapies for Eating Disorders: Can They Be Adapted to Address the Harm? 13.Incorporating Fat Pedagogy into Health Care Training: Evidence-Informed Recommendations 14.Applying the Attribution-Value Model of Prejudice to Fat Pedagogy in Health Care Settings 15.Conclusion: A Call to Fatten Pedagogy Because Lives Depend on It