Facing Challenges for Reducing Weight Stigma in Public Health Policy and Practice

by Rebecca M. Puhl

Eliminating weight stigma in public health requires collective, cross-disciplinary efforts. This review highlights different perspectives surrounding issues of body weight that, at times, impair much-needed progress to reduce weight stigma in society.

Stigma reduction initiatives will be most effective through increased recognition of weight stigma as a legitimate social justice issue and by engagement from researchers, health professionals, advocates, and people with lived experience across multiple fields of public health, public policy, medicine, obesity, eating disorders, and social sciences.

While different viewpoints persist across these disciplines, there is an underlying agreement that weight stigma is harmful and unfair and should be eliminated. This common ground should be harnessed to increase collective initiatives to tackle weight stigma in public health and practice.

As these initiatives unfold, it will be critical to position weight stigma as a social justice issue, which is often missing from discourse despite extensive research documenting societal stereotypes and prejudice, harmful health consequences of weight stigma, and weight-based inequities in health care, employment, and education.

Recognizing weight stigma as a cause of inequality that creates disparities and requires efforts to address systemic forms of bias is necessary to help remedy the structural disadvantages faced by people with higher weight.

Thus, leveraging common ground across diverse disciplines, including public health, must be prioritized to identify ways to work collaboratively and collectively to address weight stigma as a societal injustice and to dismantle the broader systemic factors that reinforce stigma and inequity.

The full research paper by Rebecca M. Puhl was published in the Annual Review of Public Health, Volume 46, in April 2025 and appears on pages 133-150.  It can be read in its entirety here:  https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-publhealth-060722-024519 Rebecca Puhl is Deputy Director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health at the University of Connecticut and Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences at UConn. A leading national research expert in the field of weight bias, Dr. Puhl conducts research and policy efforts aimed at reducing weight stigma and discrimination. She may be contacted at rebecca.puhl@uconn.edu.  Copyright © 2025 by the author.