Everywhere the girl walked in school, posters showed large and small bodies side by side, stating that only the smaller body was healthy. “How can they think that it’s promoting good health to tell people, ‘We don’t want anyone to look like you?’” the girl asked. At lunch, the girl’s smaller friends criticized what she ate — even though they were all sitting down to eat the very same lunch.
In the end, weight stigma is something that people are taught — by their parents, teachers, friends and culture. But it doesn’t have to be this way. We could learn something else instead — that weight is just another physical trait, not something bad or wrong.
With more people weighing more, it might seem like larger bodies should become more acceptable. “There’s this idea that the more exposure we have to people who are different from us, the better our attitudes should become,” says Tessa Charlesworth. When it comes to weight, though, that has not proven true, Charlesworth finds.
But not for weight. Over that time, people actually showed more bias toward larger-bodied people. Charlesworth and her colleague, Mahzarin Banaji, published their findings in a 2019 issue of Psychological Science.
This bias against size might be fueled by people thinking that weight is something a person can control. But for most people, Charlesworth explains, that just isn’t true. The vast majority of people who diet to lose weight gain it back within a few years. Also, she notes, many people interpret a larger body as “bad and unhealthy.” These people may conclude, she says, that “if you’re fat, you’re sick.”
Stigma over one’s weight can also cause stress. It’s something Tomiyama and her colleagues reported in a 2014 study in the journal Obesity. The team invited college-aged women into a room and informed them they had been enrolled for a study on shopping. Then, they told half of these women that they would not fit into the clothing in this study — dishing out weight stigma for science.
Afterward, Tomiyama’s team collected saliva from these women. A stress hormone called cortisol was higher in those who saw themselves as fat — and who had been told they would not fit into the clothing. The rude comments had an effect on both the recruits’ mood — and on the chemistry of their bodies.