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How to Challenge Weight Stigma with Dr. Fiona Willer

Sep 26, 2022

Anna Mackay and Anna Lutz have a conversation with Dr. Fiona Willer, an Australian advanced practice dietitian, academic, advocate, educator and organizational consultant on a mission to make the health sector a safe and inclusive place for larger-bodied people.

They discuss:

  • How Fiona decided to transition from being a weight-centric to a weight-inclusive practitioner, and how that affected her choices as an academic.
  • The prevalence of weight stigma and weight bias in healthcare settings, and how this affects the decisions made by healthcare practitioners when treating patients. 
  • The commonly held belief that losing weight will make someone a better person somehow and the ways we can push back against this idea.
  • What the research tells us with regards to weight science.
  • The ways we can effectively communicate weight-inclusive messaging to healthcare practitioners.
  • Strategies for parents to manage negative messaging about weight and bodies.

Links: 

Dr Fiona Willer (AdvAPD, PhD, FHEA, GAICD) is an Australian dietitian, academic, educator, non-executive board director and health advocate with a career straddling higher education and the nonprofit and private sectors.  She is a long-standing lecturer in Nutrition and Dietetics at Queensland University of Technology and is affiliated for research activities with the Healthy Primary Care team at Griffith University's Menzies Health Institute. Fiona's areas of expertise include the relationships between weight stigma, health consciousness, body appreciation and dietary quality, and the integration of inclusive weight-neutral lifestyle approaches (including Health at Every Size®) into healthcare practice and policy. Her business, Health, Not Diets, provides organisational consultancy and professional development resources for inclusive, weight-neutral healthcare practice and will be celebrating 10 years of advocacy in 2023. She is also proud to be the creator of the innovative Unpacking Weight Science professional development podcast. Fiona currently serves on the board of Dietitians Australia and has previously served on the boards of HAES Australia and the Association for Size Diversity and Health (ASDAH) in the USA.