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If you’ve ever felt criticised or misunderstood, put down, ignored, ashamed or diminished because of your body size, you’re not alone.
I know it often feels like you are, but with the continual messages from governments and the media that we’re overweight and obese and we had something this week saying that Australia is now officially the third fattest country on the planet, with the US first. But more and more people are experiencing that awful sinking feeling about their bodies, about never being good enough and not only it is painful, it’s also confusing when you do all of the right things, but your body just does what it’s doing.
Dr Samantha Thomas is one of Australia’s leading researchers into how all these negative messages in society impact on everybody – not just on the people who are being targeted.
She’s a health sociologist and head of the consumer health research group at Monash University in Australia. In 2009 she was chosen by the weekend Australian newspaper as one of the top ten emerging health leaders in Australia. She worked at the World Health Organisation in Geneva at the Institute of Psychiatry and at Kings College, London, and she’s regularly invited to speak at national and international conferences. She’s also a regular commentator in national and international press on consumer perspectives on health and well being. She’s appeared in television programs like Sunday Night Capitalist, the 7.30 Report, Today Tonight and a Current Affair – and many others.
“Fitness is a much better indicator for your health and well being than fatness, and yet all of those messages that we give in our public health campaigns from the weight loss industry, from the commercial sector, from NGO’s – repeatedly, repeatedly tell us that if we’re fat we’re lazy, we’re gluttons, we have no self control, and that if only we tried a little bit harder, we could actually become a responsible citizen within the community.
“So we’ve almost created this situation within the community where if you are not skinny, you’re less than patriotic – that’s an absolutely disgraceful place to be when we’re thinking about the health and well being of our population,” she said.
As to why we keep giving these very confusing mixed messages, there are many factors at play: government, media, and the medical profession, plus hundreds of studies which has confusing and inconclusive results. Most of the ‘solutions’ for being overweight not only don’t work, but also make people’s health worse in the long run.
People selling these ‘solutions’ that don’t work are profiting enormously, adn the rise of obesity surgery is an example that concerns Dr Thomas hugely. “These wonderful sells that we get about this being the wonderful sort of winner in the battle against weight or fatness or overweight – when really we know that there are so many problems with that type of intervention, both in terms of the health risks, in terms of the emotional risk, but also in terms of the long term data which shows that for most people that option will not work.”
To read more about the issues that Dr Thomas raised around the diet industry, and solutions to real health and wellbeing, you can purchase the 23 page ebook and audio package, just click here.