1st Edition
Weight Bias in Health Education Critical Perspectives for Pedagogy and Practice
Weight stigma is so pervasive in our culture that it is often unnoticed, along with the harm that it causes. Health care is rife with anti-fat bias and discrimination against fat people, which compromises care and influences the training of new practitioners.
This book explores how this happens and how we can change it. This interdisciplinary volume is grounded in a framework that challenges the dominant discourse that health in fat individuals must be improved through weight loss. The first part explores the negative impacts of bias, discrimination, and other harms by health care providers against fat individuals. The second part addresses how we can ‘fatten’ pedagogy for current and future health care providers, discussing how we can address anti-fat bias in education for health professionals and how alternative frameworks, such as Health at Every Size, can be successfully incorporated into training so that health outcomes for fat people improve.
Examining what works and what fails in teaching health care providers to truly care for the health of fat individuals without further stigmatizing them or harming them, this book is for scholars and practitioners with an interest in fat studies and health education from a range of backgrounds, including medicine, nursing, social work, nutrition, physiotherapy, psychology, sociology, education and gender studies.
Chapter 1- Introduction- Documented Harm: How a Misguided Paradigm Hurts Fat People (and Everybody Else)
Heather A. Brown and Nancy Ellis‐Ordway
Part I: When Healers Cause Harm
Part introduction by Nancy Ellis‐Ordway
Chapter 2- Deadweight: Unpacking Fat Shame in Psychotherapy
Catherine Baker‐Pitts
Chapter 3- Medical Equipment: The Manifestation of Anti‐Fat Bias in Medicine
Fady Shanouda
Chapter 4- "Limited By Body Habitus": Fat and Stigmatizing Rhetoric in Medical Records
Jennifer Renee Blevins
Chapter 5- "God forbid you bring a cupcake": Theorizing Biopedagogies as Professional Socialization in Dietetics Education
Meredith Bessey and Jennifer Brady
Chapter 6- A Textbook Case of Bias
Virginia Dicken‐Gracen
Chapter 7- Why Would I Want to Come Back? Weight Stigma and Noncompliance
Nancy Ellis-Ordway
Part 2: Fattening Pedagogy
Part introduction by Heather A. Brown
Chapter 8- Raising Awareness of Weight-Based Oppression in Health Care: Reflections on Lived Experience Education as Emotional Labor
Sara Martel, Alex Andrews, Laura Griffin, Amanda Hollahan, Sonia Meerai, May Friedman, Christine Heidebrecht, Chelsea D’Silva, Dianne Fierheller, and Ian Zenlea
Chapter 9- The Weight of Imaginative Resistance and Pedagogy for Narrative Transformation
Elizabeth Lanphier and Hannah Cory
Chapter 10- What Counts as Good or Bad Writing About Weight: Reflections of a Writing Coach
Heather A. Brown
Chapter 11- Clinical Revulsion: Combatting Weight Stigma by Confronting Provider Disgust
Amanda Greene and Lisa Brownstone
Chapter 12- Anti‐Fat Bias in Evidence Based Psychotherapies for Eating Disorders: Can They Be
Adapted to Address the Harm?
Rachel Millner and Lauren Muhlheim
Chapter 13- Incorporating Fat Pedagogy into Health Care Training: Evidence‐Informed
Recommendations
Alexandria Schmidt and Paula M. Brochu
Chapter 14- Applying the Attribution‐Value Model of Prejudice to Fat Pedagogy in Health Care Settings
Paula M. Brochu and Roya Amirniroumand
Chapter 15- Conclusion: A Call to Fatten Pedagogy Because Lives Depend on It
Heather A. Brown and Nancy Ellis‐Ordway
Biography
Heather A. Brown is the Assistant Director of the University Writing Center at the A.T. Still University College of Graduate Health Studies. She earned an MTS from Harvard Divinity School and an EdD in Adult and Higher Education from Northern Illinois University. Her research is focused on the connections between weight and learning and how to promote academic achievement in fat women in postsecondary education.
Nancy Ellis-Ordway is a psychotherapist in private practice in Jefferson City, Missouri, with 30 years' experience; she specializes in treating eating disorders, body image issues, stress, anxiety, depression, and relationship issues. She earned a Master of Social Work degree from Washington University and has a Ph.D. in Health Education and Promotion from the University of Missouri.
"The book feels simultaneously grounded in academic theory and research, alongside important reflections on the lived experiences of the contributors and people in their lives and work [...] This book would be a great resource to use in a variety of health education classes, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, to introduce weight bias and weight-inclusive care to students. Weight Bias in Health Education is quite readable and could be read throughout the semester, or assigned as individual chapters, as they also stand well on their own. Practicing health professionals would also benefit from reading this volume, as would healthcare educators who are new to the area but want to introduce these ideas into their classrooms."
Meredith Bessey in Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society