« A People Thinning Institution. Changing bodies and souls in a commercial weight-loss group » (original) (raw)
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Big Scale Loss: An Ethnographic Look into Commercial Weight Loss
Drawing on data from personal interviews from a small group of women who have been members of large scale commercial weight loss programs, this article explores their experiences and attempts to pinpoint the role of communication in the weight loss experience. It focuses on the savoir-faire per personal narrative. Self-determination theory (Webber, 2013), is applied to the weight loss experience of participants. The role of traditional healthcare in weight loss is addressed as well as the implications of weight gain on health. Most importantly the aspects of communication deemed accommodating are analyzed.
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Sociological Research Online, 2016
The concept of weight management has gained currency in present political and social discourses on weight and health, organizing the various efforts to fight obesity and to assist individuals in controlling their weight. In this paper, we ask whether weight management is becoming rooted also in the everyday life of individuals. Adopting a practice-theoretical approach we study whether weight management constitutes an intelligible and distinct entity to people problematizing their weight. By analysing data generated by focus group discussions with Finnish consumers we investigate the ways in which people understand the concept of weight management, what kinds of techniques they use in order to manage their weight, and what kind of emotional and normative positions they take with respect to weight management. We analyse weight management in relation to eating, but acknowledge the role of another practices, such as exercising. We conclude that weight management is not a clearly defined...
SOCIAL LOGICS OF THE ADOPTION OF TECHNIQUESBODY SLIMMING
The qualitative study by an inductive approach on the weight loss of young girls is part of a social context marked by the appearance of the cult of thinness among young girls in Côte d'Ivoire. Two essential ideas stand out, namely: the buxom body is perceived as the dominant beauty standard among the female population in Côte d'Ivoire on the one hand and on the other hand, the recourse to slimming diets by certain young girls in the commune Cocody (Abidjan) having become overweight. Also, the adoption of slimming diets by young girls who have become overweight is in contradiction with the social construction of the buxom body as the dominant beauty norm among the female population in Côte d'Ivoire. Thus, the objectives of the study aim to describe the body weight loss techniques used by young girls in Cocody who have become overweight; to show how systems of representation of bodily beauty lead to the adoption of body slimming techniques by young girls in Cocody who have become overweight; to identify the mechanism by which the social relations within the groups to which they belong structure the adoption of techniques for slimming the body by the young girls of Cocody who have become overweight; and to define the issues associated with the adoption of bodyslimming techniques by overweight young girls in Cocody.
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This research emerged through my growing discomfort with the escalating attention given to the current obesity "crisis". I was worried that, with the growing number of agencies, government task forces, fitness groups, and educators rallying to fight obesity, research within physical education attending to the social effects of the (re)production of obesity as a health crisis may have been subordinated to other agendasnamely obesity prevention and reduction. Therefore, the aim of this thesis was to interrogate the possible effects the proliferation of obesity discoursedefined as the knowledge and practices surrounding and underpinning obesity reduction initiatives (re)produced in scientific literature, popular culture and public discourse as health information-may have for the ways in which bodies, behaviour and the self are known. Two New Zealand-made reality television programmes -Eat Yourself
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Rituals provide public solutions to some types of life crises, or change. There are crises which beset the individual in modern society which are not easily addressed by public ritual. The present paper observes such a life crisis and identifies conscious rites performed by individuals. These rites are called, "personal definitional rites", and take place in situations demanding identity changes. Newly acquired identity is performed ritually in an attempt to elicit recognition of a new social state. Thirty-six patients clinically defined as obese underwent gastric reduction surgery. Patients were interviewed after having lost excess weight in order to understand the social results of the dramatic change in appearance. Patients described various "rites" they used to complete their conversion from fat to thin. These rites are compared to rites of transition and definition.
Fat bodies and thin bodies. Cultural, biomedical and market discourses on obesity
Appetite, 2010
This article is part of a larger study that aims to analyze how and why specific eating behaviors have become social problems and how dietary norms are constructed in industrialized societies, particularly in Spain. 1 My objective is to show that the growing problematization of excess weight and food consumption is related to processes of medicalization, individualization and commodification, which in turn are anchored in a wider historical process of ''civilizing the appetite'' . In the past five decades this civilizing process has intensified, resulting in four distinct but closely linked phenomena: first, the establishment of ideal body weight and dietary norms; second, the construction of thinness as an attribute of health, self-discipline and social distinction; third, the recognition of obesity as an illness; and fourth, the transformation of health and the body into business opportunities.
Appetite, 2010
To deepen our understanding of the relationship between social class and obesity, the study compares the ways in which conceptions of health and personal body weight are enmeshed in the everyday lives of people with disparate socio-cultural backgrounds and weight status. We ask how perceptions and enactments of health and personal body weight are related to social structures and practices at work, in spare time, and in family life. Qualitative interviews focusing on life history and current everyday life were conducted with two groups of Danish adults. One group contained highly educated people of normal weight. The other contained people with less education and body weights above the obesity threshold. Recommended healthy lifestyle regimes complied more fully with the established practices and internalized ideas of those in the normal weight highly educated group than they did with the practices and ideas of those in the high-BMI less educated group. Work environments, and also conditions connected with work that were carried over into spare time and family life, further promoted the integration of healthy lifestyles into the everyday practices of the highly educated, normal weight group. In the less educated, high-BMI group this kind of integration occurred less. ß
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Leisure Studies, 2005
At present, the western world wrestles with an obesity epidemic whilst, paradoxically, maintaining a fascination for the aesthetic ideal body. With the Scottish health and fitness industry providing the empirical backdrop, and drawing on the work of Bourdieu, this paper critically reflects upon processes of embodied production and consumption and the quest for physical capital and its referential symbolism. Using a range of qualitative methods across three case study facilities it is argued that as consumers seek to attain desired forms of physical capital, health and fitness clubs serve both to capitalize on and perpetuate cycles of embodied dissatisfaction. Although willingly subjecting their bodies to constant ocularcentric and objectifying processes, consumers are constantly reminded of their failure to attain the physical capital they desire. These processes not only mirror modern consumerism but also highlight a process of self‐imposed domination. With external medical and media discourses exerting persistent pressure on the embodied state, desire for physical capital produces a self‐legitimating and regulatory regime perpetrated upon the self within the internal environment of the health and fitness club. Therefore, as a venue for playing out aesthetic politics, health and fitness club spaces are anything but healthy as they oil the desire and dreamscape of physical capital, maintaining an aesthetic masochism and thus keeping the treadmills literally and economically turning.
Qualitative Social Work, 2010
In recent years obesity has emerged as a potential public health crisis. This article examines how being overweight is framed as a social problem in two public Danish organizations. Using recorded interactions between health consultants and overweight people, this article explores how overweight people develop a sense of self in weight loss programmes. This article uses an interactionist approach in exploring the dual nature of identities involving both the self and social structure. Drawing on sociological literature concerning the relationship between the body, health, risk and society, this paper shows how overweight people in western society are currently perceived as being morally inferior. This societal context frames the participating organizations that offer weight loss programmes to overweight people, and hence results in organizational identities that equate being overweight with having psychological problems. The analysis in this article shows the importance of situating identity processes in the organizational framework in which they occur and situating organizations in a broader societal framework that casts some people as morally inferior and others as ‘normal’.