William, I'm a fan of yours, really. I love your stuff. But you jumped off a cliff on this one.

Your analysis of flawed reporting about the study you cited is correct, but your conclusion that stigma will help is a leap of faith. Nothing in the study supports that conclusion.

I've seen no studies anywhere that support that conclusion. Have you?

What really happens when you direct hatred towards obese people? When you shun them, fire them, refuse to hire them, insult them, attack them, abuse them? Does it motivate them to become thin?

What it does is depress the hell out of them. Quite a lot of them turn to food as the only fleeting source of comfort remaining to them.

My take on this study is this: social influences do matter. If you hang out with guys who routinely wolf a box of doughnuts, you may say "why not?" And wolf your own. People can be influenced socially into altering behavior. But this mechanism is "reinforcement," or "encouragement," not "stigmatization." There's no way to conclude that stigma will produce the reverse effect.

If you've seen any studies which show a positive correlation between stigmatization and weight loss, I'll eat my words. If you haven't, take it back, William. Your treatment is worse than the disease.

Very well put.

The stigma's already there, and the worst part is when you're transitioning between unhealthy habits and healthy ones.

People get very, very confused if you're a fat person who eats healthy food, works out, and says "no" to "treats". What they don't say (although the ones who know me well have admitted they'd like to say it) is, "But you're fat. What do you mean you have healthy eating and exercise habits?"

Weight gain can happen very quickly. Weight loss (at least the healthy kind) happens very slowly. Stigmatisation just makes it harder for people to get back to being healthy.

Perhaps "noisette" is French for "Nazi"? Why don't we take all of the fat people and put them into ghettos, far away from the perfect, skinny people? And if they get noisy about it, we'll put them into camps even further away from the perfection of the skinny ones. Eventually, we might as well start burning those fat buggers, because, ewwww, who wants to see them, i mean, yuck, eh, noisette? We could use them for fuel!!! Brilliant! That will solve your problem, it worked great for Hitler, and wasn't HE the forward thinker. Eventually, I dream of living in a world where everyone is exactly the same, a world of empty headed sorority girls with perfect skin and flat little tummies with cute little belly rings and nothing to contribute to the world but their vanity, cruelty, hatred and ignorance. OH, and of course, their ever popular and always available vaginas. Because remember, everyone, you should never be in the presence of someone whose company you enjoy unless that person is also perfect-looking. It is futile to like someone for who they are. You should be as superficial as possible and completely close-minded. Shun all fat people!! Only then will we be able to be truly at peace. Thank you, noisette, for your compassion and deep understanding of human frailties. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some fat friends to unload, that is, if I can get them to stop eating those donuts and pizza. May every pain that a fat person has endured from a nazi bugger like you be visited upon your skinny ass a thousand fold. Love ya!

Without getting into a huge argument about it, I think it is reasonable to point out that human life evolved on this planet in an environment of caloric and nutritional deficiency. A major concern of prehistoric humans was to obtain enough food to remain alive, and starvation probably ranked high on the list of causes of death for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years. When food was available, therefore, it was a matter of survival to gorge on nourishment when the occasional mastodon roast (or whaterver) was available.

Today, however, we are surrounded by food, with the U.S. food industry cranking out something well in excess of daily nutritional needs for the populace (I recall seeing a figure of 6,000 calories per capita per day, but I do not know where). The "norm," I would suggest, is to eat ourselves to death in obeyance to these evolutionary mandates. In the current environment, fat is normal. Overcoming these evolutionary mandates is extremely dificult for most of us.

But the process is extremely simple. I am reminded of a quip in an issue of MAD magazine many years ago" New diet breakthrough! To gain weight, eat more. To lose weight, eat less." In the final analysis, that is all there is to it. You choose.