inquiry + innovation
Weight! You Don’t Say By Donna Boen ’83 MTSC ’96
Psychologist Jeffrey Hunger dispels five myths about a weight-centered approach to good health. What you weigh is not a great indicator of how healthy you are. That’s according to Jeffrey Hunger, an assistant professor in Miami University’s Psychology Department who, as a social and health psychologist, has spent the past decade researching the mental and physical health consequences of weight stigma. Underlying the weight-focused approach to health and health policy, he said, are five myths and assumptions: 1. High weight equals poor health. 2. Long-term weight loss is widely achievable. 3. Weight loss will result in improvements in physical health. 4. Weight stigma is an effective way to promote weight loss. 5. Seeing or recognizing oneself as overweight is the key to spurring health-promoting behaviors and, ultimately, weight loss.
“Especially during lockdown, we saw a surprising uptick in substance and drug use. Making sure we integrate that into how we’re thinking about health promotion is critical. Folks get a little bit too narrowly focused on what we’re doing in terms of eating and exercise and ignore these other aspects of our health.” —Assistant Psychology Professor Jeffrey Hunger
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miamian magazine
In his webinar hosted by the Miami University Alumni Association in June, Hunger shared research and data to dispel the myths and offered recommendations in their place. And, yes, Hunger is his real name. For those who might wonder why he is such a strong advocate for change, he points to the prominent role weight loss continues to play in determining governmental policies, pointing to a 2016 decision by the federal government that allows private companies to charge employees up to 30% more for health coverage when they don’t meet their corporation’s weight-related criteria. “Not surprisingly, then, we live in a world in which there is a focus on monitoring people based on their weight, an insistence on and obsession with weightrelated surveillance,” he said. “These approaches are ineffective at best and more likely than not, harmful.”
Large portion of population misclassified One striking example of a dangerous policy that he cited is the U.K. National Health Service’s soup-andshakes plan introduced in 2020. Designed for weight loss to cure diabetes, this plan consists of an almost entirely liquid diet of only 800 calories a day for an entire year. “For a point of comparison, the Minnesota Starvation Study, which was conducted in the 1950s, provided subjects with 1,600 calories for 24 weeks, and that was considered starvation,” Hunger said. “So the weight-centered lens that a lot of folks view weight through can really obscure the fact that behaviors, like an 800-calorie liquid diet that we would prescribe to heavier individuals, could lead to in-patient treatment for disordered eating among thinner individuals.” What’s even more troubling, he said, is that extensive research, including his own work, has found that