Originally Posted by
Ziggurat
It's an interesting question, but I don't know how you study it. You could only ever do observational studies, you could never do a controlled study because that would never get past an Institutional Review Board. And I don't know if you could separate out fat shaming from other factors in a purely observational study.
There's *lots* of studies that do exactly this, to the point where it's even broken down by demography (adult males, male vs female K-12 age, [
LGBTQ]... )
It's a very studied subject, for obvious reasons - policymakers want to do something about obesity. Fat shaming is a national pastime. Is it working? Can we make it work better? &c.
We also have credible proxies such as public weighings, which are part of many K-12 school health programs, which have been introduced to random students in a single class, as an attempt to control for as many variables as possible.
The results show that public humiliation of the overweight has negative motivational results, and negative weight loss effects (specifically: causes more weight gain, reduces participation in physical activities, and increases depression and suicide rates).
The conflict, as pointed out by many posters, is that fat shaming is something some people want to do for their own reasons, but the data show's it causes the situation to worsen. The complication is that while advocates say it's about reducing weight, when confronted with the data, they persist anyway, and that reveals to me that it's not about the patients, it seems to be more about the shamer's personal entertainment/gratification.
The other one that policymakers keep trying - but is proven not to work - is activity. '[
Normal]' increased activity levels (eg: [
giving kids ten times as much physed]) just don't seem to have any effect on obesity rates. We are more active than our previous three or four generations of ancestors; obesity is a product of gradual calorie intake increases over that timeframe, which has various causes that need to be addressed in their own ways.
(My background
25 years as a personal fitness trainer.
I was unusual in my personal fitness training career in that I was very scientifically predisposed (my masters is research medicine). Most of my peers were highschool grads with the minimum biology required for provincial certification, and good lord the quackery and healthfraud was rampant. I also had the advantage of a psychology degree and license as a therapist at the time (disclosure - I'm no longer a licensed therapist). I spent 25 years with people who were trying to modify their bodies through willpower and effort, be it muscle mass gain or adipose tissue loss or endurance improvement, &c. I've kept current as part of skepticism/healthfraud, and I maintain some adjacent skills as an open water swim coach for adults and children. I am *considering* returning to the profession when I take a package at my current workplace in a few years, but it will depend on how my writing is going.
A valuable skeptical concept here is something called Attribution Bias
WP. We congratulate ourselves on making complex decisions, while attributing the decisions of others to them being mindless sheep. I see this in practice with fat shaming. [
I have seen a lot of fat shamers gain wait and either never speak of it again] or double down and emphasize that for them it's *different*. But the truth is, most of us were never demonstrating better willpower or knowledge... just wrapping a story around the fact that we were dealt a different hand of cards.