Weight-based bias, or weight stigma, refers to the prejudicial treatment individuals face due to their body weight or size. This form of discrimination, particularly anti-fatness, can significantly impact various aspects of university life, including academic performance, mental health, and social inclusion, as individuals in larger bodies are often the most marginalized and face systemic bias and exclusion. While UC Berkeley is known for its commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and justice (DEIBJ), anti-fatness, rooted in the same systems of oppression as anti-Black racism, remains a largely unaddressed issue.
Body Diversity and Weight Inclusion Work Group
The UC Berkeley Body Diversity and Weight Inclusion Work Group (BDWI), composed of faculty, staff, and student representatives, promotes a campus environment that embraces community members of all shapes, sizes, and social identities. The group meets regularly to better understand anti-fat bias on campus and in our own lives, creates and shares recommendations for improving the campus environment and culture, and supports a culture shift towards a campus that celebrates bodies of all shapes and sizes.
Contact us at bodydiversity@berkeley.edu.
Read the latest summary of the work group’s recommendations.
Projects
- Decline to Weigh Initiative at UHS
- University Health Services is taking steps to provide weight-inclusive care, recently moving to an opt-in weighing process in the medical clinics.
- If you do not want to be weighed at your medical appointment, you can decline to be weighed or decline to know what your weight is. Please let us know your preference.
- Does knowing you can decline being weighed make you more likely to book an appointment? Tell us at bodydiversity@berkeley.edu.
- Body Diversity and Weight Inclusion trainings at UHS (All Staff, Be Well at Work employees, UHS Health Workers, medical staff)
- Body Diversity and Weight Inclusion trainings on campus (MNSD students, Hope Scholars)
- Weight inclusive seating at UHS and campus (in progress)
- Weight inclusion added to UC-wide bias trainings (in progress)
- Body Diversity and Weight Inclusion Tips Sheet (in progress)
Weight-Based Discrimination & Anti-Fatness 101
By Virgie Tovar, MA
Description: Weight-based discrimination and fatphobia are normalized through current medical/health paradigms, which pathologize the fat body as unnatural, unhealthy, and undeserving of care. These paradigms have been critiqued for being unsupported empirically and for facilitating the poor treatment of people in larger bodies. Viewing fat bodies through the lens of medicine/health limits our ability to understand that ending weight-based discrimination is an urgent human rights issue above all else. In this intersectional primer, expect to learn the basics of what weight-based discrimination and fatphobia are, how they manifest explicitly and implicitly, theories on their origins, a review of some of the literature that tracks their impacts (from medical bias leading to less frequent preventive care for fat patients to the bias that leads to a wage gap between plus-size women and straight-size women), as well as short and long term solutions. This session is led by Virgie Tovar, author of four books (including You Have the Right to Remain Fat and The Self-Love Revolution: Radical Body Positivity for Girls of Color) and contributor for Forbes.com, where she covers the plus-size market and how to end weight discrimination at work.
Resources
Academic articles
- It's not just a "woman thing:" the current state of normative discontent
- Links between discrimination and cardiovascular health among socially stigmatized groups: A systematic review
- Perceived weight discrimination amplifies the link between central adiposity and nondiabetic glycemic control (HbA1c)
- Weight Discrimination and Risk of Mortality
- Weightism, racism, classism, and sexism: shared forms of harassment in adolescents
Books
- Anti-Diet by Christy Harrison, MPH, RD
- Belly of the Beast by Da’Shaun L. Harrison
- Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture by Virginia Sole-Smith
- Fearing the Black Body: the Racial Origins of Fat Phobia by Sabrina Strings
- Reclaiming Body Trust by Hilary Kinavey, MS, LPC, and Dana Sturtevant, MS, RD
- Unshrinking by Kate Manne
- What We Don’t talk about When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon
- “You Just Need to Lose Weight” and 19 Other Myths About Fat People by Aubrey Gordon
News Articles & Blog Posts
- Books to Help You Reclaim Body Trust - Center for Body Trust
- ‘Diet Culture’ Isn’t Just About Smoothies and Food-Tracking Apps - Self Magazine
- Fat Is Not the Problem—Fat Stigma Is - Scientific American
- Research articles - compiled by Ragen Chastain
- The Racist Roots of Fighting Obesity - Scientific American
- The Weight Game: How Body-Size Bias Can Hold Back Health Science - Scientific American
Newsletters
Podcasts
- Burnt Toast - Weekly conversations about how we dismantle diet culture and fatphobia, especially through parenting, health and fashion (but non-parents like it too!)
- How to Eat Intuitively in 2023 with Psychotherapist Andrea Wachter - The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos
- Maintenance Phase - Wellness and weight loss, debunked and decoded.
- The Body Mass Index episode - Spotify, Apple Music
- Tell Me I'm Fat - This American Life
- The Body Trust Podcast - Hosted by Dana Sturtevant, Hilary Kinavey, and Sirius Bonner, The Body Trust Podcast will challenge prevailing views on food, bodies, weight, and health, and unpack how social justice intersects with body liberation.
Social Media
- @decolonizing_fitness (Instagram) - Ilya Parker identifies as a Black, nonbinary, fat movement practitioner, physical therapy assistant, and founder of Decolonizing Fitness. This page shares resources to build liberatory movement practices.
Websites