Do you have a skinny doctor who tells you “…you need to learn to push yourself away from the table,” or make other equally outrageous statements…advising you on losing weight?
It use to really make my blood boil. Skinny doctors who’ve never had a weight problem their whole life, pompous asses looking down their nose at me, telling me to lose weight…treating me almost like I was the village idiot or the neighborhood drug dealer.
Lately, I’ve been doing some research on the topic of weight bias in our society. I knew it existed because anyone who has been or is overweight has experienced it in their lives…at work, at school and at the doctor’s office.
But I was shocked to learn that according to the Rudd Center at Yale University, in one study 69% of the 2,449 overweight or obese women reported bias against them by Doctors. These results certainly confirmed my own experiences in the past but the numbers were much higher than I would have guessed.
Other studies support this finding, showing that doctors seeing overweight patients tend to spend less time with the patient, engage in less discussion, and do less intervention.
The sad truth is that most of us fat people, when faced with criticism at the doctor’s office or at work or school…react by eating more or refusing to diet. It just pisses us off, right?!! It sure as hell doesn’t motivate us.
The motivation has to come from within. You have to experience a “tipping point” which may be externally triggered but the next step, experiencing the “white hot moment” of intense emotion, must come from within. Channeled negative emotion transformed into positive emotion and positive action is the key to long-term weight loss success.
I promise you, you WILL LEARN how to use and transform all of your negativity into positive action when you read my new book, Weight Loss for Wimps. It is jammed packed full of unique and creative weight loss motivation tips.