How weight (dis)satisfaction shapes physical activity participation across the life course: Affect, embodiment, and identities as (often) forgotten intersecting dimensions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Within Western culture, emphasis is placed on youthfulness, thinness, and muscularity, and dissatisfaction with one’s weight is rendered normative, with maladaptive dieting and physical activity often sought to change body shape and size. Missing from the existing psychological literature on physical activity is an examination of how experiences with weight and movement are affectively laden, embodied, shaped by complex intersecting identities, and constrained by the backdrop of ageism, cis-heterosexism, racism, healthism, and fatphobia. Drawing on data from six studies exploring experiences of the body and physical activity in elite athletes, pregnant women, and older adults, we examined how individuals from diverse social positions storied their experiences with weight across the life course. Three narrative themes were identified across the participants’ stories via thematic and structural narrative analyses of semi-structured and life history interviews with 112 participants. Participants positioned fatness as a moral transgression stemming from failed personal responsibility for physical activity engagement. Participants described ‘feeling fat’, and attempted to discipline their bodies when experiencing age, pregnancy, and sport-related body changes, which engendered shame and guilt, and constrained pleasurable experiences with physical activity. Weight-related beliefs were underpinned by ageism and cis-heterosexism; participants pointed to the value of attempting to retain a thin and youthful physique through physical activity engagement to attract the opposite sex and gender. These findings contribute to the existing literature on the body and physical activity by pointing to the importance of identities and the affective and culturally imbued dimensions of weight when studying physical (in)activity participation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".