Your article still emphasizes the negative idea of stigmatization of fat, in the guise that it was disingenuous for scientists to advise against dumping your fat friends while advising you to get some skinny friends too. I believe you have made a fallacious argument based on there only being so much time in the day and if you spend one hour playing basketball with your skinny friend you will have to subtract that hour from your friendship time with your fat friend. However, people do not live in a world of binary choices. Perhaps that hour for the new skinny friend comes from the time you used to sit on the couch watching TV by yourself and eating potato chips, not from the hour you spent with your fat friend.
Most importantly you have made another leap of logic by saying that fat stigma is the way to keep people thin. How do you know active stigma and active "don't get fat" messages are how thin people stay thin and encourage others in their social network to do the same? Is thinness spread by thin people telling other thin people not to get fat? Or is thinness spread by a subtle promotion of being active and eating well? Fat people aren't spreading fat by telling their friends to be fat, so why would you assume that telling people to be skinny would be effective? Isn't it more likely that I have friends that I admire that are skinny, these friends like to hike and tell me about hiking. Then, I think, hiking sounds like fun, I'm going to do more of it. Nobody told me I was fat and to cut it out. I think you are missing the subtle/subconscious way these messages spread- (getting fat or staying fit), which is really the most surprising part of the study.
