Weight Bias and Social Justice: Implications for Education and Practice
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Weight Bias and Social Justice: Implications for Education and Practice Sarah Nutter 1 & Shelly Russell-Mayhew 1 & Nancy Arthur 1 & John H. Ellard 2
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018
Abstract Weight bias is a widespread and persistent form of oppression that adversely impacts the lives of individuals with obesity in many areas of society. In this paper, we discuss the implications of weight bias as a social justice issue for counsellor education and practice. We provide recommendations for professional education, including the need to examine social location, knowledge, assumptions, and biases about weight and individuals with obesity. We also provide recommendations related to advocacy for individuals with obesity in practice. Keywords Weight bias . Social justice . Counsellor education
Introduction Individuals with obesity experience a plethora of social and health consequences due to the negative attitudes, beliefs, and stereotypes, also known as weight bias, about them (Puhl and Heuer 2009). Crandall (1994) described weight bias as being Bovert, expressible, and widely held^ (p. 891), a statement that holds true when considering current research on stereotypes about individuals with obesity (Mussap et al. 2016). During the last 25 years, researchers have found that weight bias has significantly increased (Andreyeva et al. 2008), and have documented the pervasiveness of such bias across social contexts as well as across the lifespan (Puhl and Heuer 2009). More specifically, researchers have consistently found weight bias to negatively impact the success of individuals with obesity in education (Kenney et al. 2015) and the workplace (Giel et al. 2012), their received quality of health care (Phelan et al. 2015) and
* Sarah Nutter [email protected]
1
Counselling Psychology, Graduate Programs in Education EDT 114, University of Calgary, 2500 University Dr. NW, Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada
2
Department of Psychology, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada
Int J Adv Counselling
their interpersonal relationships (Puhl et al. 2011). The strength and prevalence of these attitudes have also been demonstrated to impact the physical and psychological health of individuals with obesity, including increased stress (Tomiyama et al. 2014), risk of eating disorders and disordered eating behaviours (Douglas and Varnado-Sullivan 2016), body dissatisfaction and depression (Stevens et al. 2016), and decreased life expectancy (Sutin et al. 2015). Although the majority of weight bias research has been conducted with Western populations, effort has been made by researchers (e.g., Brewis et al. 2011; Hart et al. 2016; Puhl et al. 2015) to compare and contrast such attitudes among people from different countries and cultures. The first study to examine differences in weight bias was conducted with individuals from 10 countries (American Samoa, Argentina, Iceland, Mexico, New Zealand, Paraguay, Puerto Rico, United Kingdom, United States, and Tanzania; Brewis et al. 2011). The results from
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