Words with weight: The construction of obesity in eating disorders research
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In current public health discourse, obesity is conceptualized as a disease epidemic, with treatment being weight loss. The pursuit of weight loss as a treatment for the "disease" of obesity is in direct contradiction to the history of research in eating disorders, which has demonstrated the risks for the development of eating disorders. In this study, we critically examined the eating disorder literature to explore this contradiction. We analyzed 30 of the top-cited articles in the eating disorder literature between 1994 and 2011, asking: how is the concept of obesity examined in eating disorder research? We identified tensions related to body mass index and the perceived associated risks of lower or higher body mass index, assumptions of the "causes" of fatness (i.e. overeating and inactivity), and the anti-diet voice challenging the prescription of dieting for those in fat bodies. In our analysis, we highlight the problematics of, for instance, prescribing a body mass index range of 20-24 in eating disorder recovery, how many studies in eating disorders do not problematize the presumption that a higher body mass index is necessarily associated with ill health, and a lack of cultural sensitivity and acknowledgment of intersectional spaces of belonging. We discuss these themes in the context of biomedical discourses of obesity contributing to the cultural thin ideal. We argue that biomedical discourses on obesity contribute to the thin ideal nuanced against discourses of healthism that permeate our society. Rather than an ideal of emaciation, it is an ideal of a healthy, productive person, often constructed as morally superior. The moral panic around obesity is evident throughout the eating disorder literature, which is a concern given that we would hope that the aim of eating disorder treatment would be to promote wellness for all-not only those who are thin.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".