The New York Times says that thin experts, concerned with the health implications of obesity, have started a campaign to put pressure on the obsese by keeping up a stream of reasons why obsesity is bad and shouldn’t be tolerated.
In other words, they have decided to stigmatize obesity, by blaming it for bad things, apparently assuming that since they would be ashamed to be fat, if they can just make fat people ashamed, they will start trying not to be fat.
Reseachers at Chamaign Urbana decided to see if this would work, and asked 3000 overweight people about “their experiences of stigmatization and discrimination and how they responded.”
“Almost everyone said they ate more,” reports the Times.
You can’t change someone who is buried by sigmatization and discrimination by more stigmatization and discrimination. We just get pushed farther away, more beyond the pale.
And we hurt more, too.