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Purpose: To understand how lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, and asexual (LBTQA+) young women interpret the social construction of “lesbian obesity” in the context of their lived experiences and membership in the LGBTQ+ community.

Methodology: Individual, in-depth interviews were conducted with a convenience sample of 25 LBTQA+ women, ages 18–24, to explore how participants perceive and experience dominant discourses about gender, sexuality, and weight. Interviews were analyzed using a combination of deductive and inductive coding approaches.

Findings: Participants resisted public health discourse that frames obesity as a disease and the implication that their sexual identities put their health at risk. Many participants viewed their sexual identities and membership in the LGBTQ+ community as protective factors for their health statuses in general and their body image in particular.

Implications: Our findings suggest a need to reconsider the utility of the concept of “lesbian obesity” to characterize the significance of elevated rates of overweight and obesity in this population. Public health and clinical interventions guided by body positive approaches may be of greater relevance for sexual minority women.

Originality: This study centers the perceptions and experiences of LBTQA+ young women in order to examine how the intersections of sexual minority identity, dominant cultural ideals about weight, and obesity discourse inform their health.

This paper contributes to emerging discourse about social movements in social marketing by examining how tensions, issues and challenges may arise in areas of social change that have attracted social movements and the ways actors can come together to drive inclusive social change agendas.

Through the lens of new social movement theory, a case study of the interactions and dynamics between fat activists and obesity prevention public health actors is examined. This is undertaken through a multi-method qualitative analysis of interview and archival blog data of fat activists located in Australia, which was compared with the campaign materials and formative and evaluative research related to two high profile Australian Government funded anti-obesity campaigns.

The case analysis highlights the disconnect between public health actors and the marginalized voices of those they are meant to be representing. Whilst public health actors characterise obesity as a social issue of individual responsibility, disease and rational-decision making; fat activists frame a competing collective identity of well-being, support and self-acceptance that characterise their social change efforts.

This research highlights how complexities arise but can potentially be overcome in creating inclusive social change coalitions that incorporate the voices of citizen groups whom have mobilised into social movements. Specifically, we highlight the importance of generating a common language around obesity, the significance of collaborative and supportive relations and the need to create common unity through emotional investment and returns - a departure from the highly rational approaches taken by most social change programs.

Obesity is a complex social issue marked by conflict and contestation between those who are obese and the very actors working to support them. Our research contends that creating an inclusive social change coalition between these stakeholders will require a shift towards language anchored in well-being as opposed to disease, relations defined by support as opposed to an emphasis on individual responsibility and emotional investments that work to bolster self-acceptance in place of rational appeals as to the “correct” behaviours one should chose to engage in. Such steps will ensure social change program design is collaborative and incorporates the lived experiences of the very citizens such initiatives are targeted towards.

We contribute to wider discussions in social marketing about the development of holistic and progressive, multi-stakeholder, multi-level programs by advocating that inclusive social change coalitions united through the collective identity elements of cognitions and language, relational ties and emotional investment offer an important step forward in tackling the wicked problems that social marketers work to address.

The purpose of this paper is to explore ways in which children and young people are being positioned as change agents for families through school health promotion initiatives in New Zealand.

The paper maps and describes the kinds of policies and initiatives that directly or indirectly regard children as conduits of healthy eating and exercise messages/practices for families. Drawing on post-structural theoretical frameworks, it explores what these resources suggest in terms of how healthy families should live.

Families are positioned as central to school health promotion initiatives in New Zealand, especially in relation to obesity prevention policies and strategies. Children are further positioned as agents of change for families in many of the resources/policies/initiatives reviewed. They are represented as key transmitters and translators of school-based health knowledge and as capable of, and responsible for, helping their families eat well and exercise more.

While recognising children’s agency and capacity to translate health messages is a powerful and welcome message at one level, the author need to consider the implications of requiring children to convey health information, to judge their family practices and, at times, to be expected to change these. This may create anxiety, family division and expect too much of children.

The paper takes a novel post-structural perspective on a familiar health promotion issue. Given the proliferation of family-focussed health initiatives in New Zealand and elsewhere, this perspective may help us to explore, critique and understand more fully how children are expected to be engaged in these initiatives, and the potentially harmful implications of these expectations.

The aim of this literature review is to summarise and synthesise the research base concerning childhood obesity and physical activity, particularly in relation to teachers and schools and within a policy context of the UK. The review investigates childhood obesity, physical activity, physical education, the role of teachers, the role of schools and physical activity in the classroom.

A literature review was undertaken involving selection of primary research and other systematic reviews. A computer search was performed using a combination of keywords including: obesity, prevention, intervention, preventive, teachers, schools, healthy schools, role models, physical activity, physical education, active school, active classroom. The review also includes samples of media coverage of the issue.

This review highlights the complex and ambiguous nature of the evidence in relation to this important contemporary issue.

A limited understanding of childhood obesity is evident from the review and this precludes definitive conclusions in relation to almost all aspects of the agenda. More quality research is needed in almost all areas of the topic, including areas such as the engagement of schools and teachers.

In this chapter I explore how conflicting discursive claims made by the medical community are consequential for bariatric weight loss surgery patients. Bariatric surgery has become increasingly common in the United States since the 1990s, with over 177,000 Americans undergoing surgery in 2006. Despite the surgery's growing popularity, the US medical community does not wholeheartedly endorse the surgery. Rather, different members of the medical community espouse contradictory evaluations of weight loss surgery. I broadly characterize this intra-medical community controversy and, then, discuss how conflicting claims have helped shape the bariatric surgery industry's discursive conception of an “ideal patient.” Next, I analyze actual patients’ negotiations of the ideal patient archetype, and find that patients’ responses follow three paths: embracing the ideal, having a mixed response to the ideal, and strategically complying with the ideal. As patients are compelled to grapple with the ideal archetype in order to access surgery, I conclude that the ideal archetype acts as a discursive frame connecting individual patients to broad bariatric surgery discourses.

In spite of wide civic and academic interest in obesity, there are no bibliometric records of this issue in the marketing corpus. Thus, this inquiry is conceived to address this shortcoming with a bibliometric analysis of Scopus indexed articles published on the subject.

The analysis followed a five-step science mapping approach of study design, data collection, data analysis, data visualisation and data interpretation. R programming software was used to review 88 peer reviewed journals published between 1987 and 2021.

A sizable stream of literature exploring obesity has accrued in the marketing area as authors have drawn parallels between the influence of persuasive communication and advertising on human wellbeing and child health. The United States of America is found to be by far the country with the highest number of publications on obesity, followed by Australia and the United Kingdom. The topic dendrogram indicates two strands of obesity discourse: (1) social and policy intervention opportunities and (2) the effects on social groups in the population.

This review will shape future enquiries investigating obesity. Beyond the focus on children, males and females, an emerging focus on cola, ethics, food waste, milk, policy-making and students is highlighted.

This is the first bibliometric review of obesity in the marketing literature. This is especially timely for weighing up the utility of research aimed at understanding and reporting the trends, influences and role of stakeholders in addressing obesity.

Over the last couple of decades, health has become a central part of the subject content in physical education (PE) curricula in many countries. As a result, issues of health have been foregrounded much more clearly in the teaching of PE. The aim of this study was to explore how Swedish PE teachers make sense of health in relation to their teaching practices. This was done through investigating conceptions and theories about health in the teachers' descriptions of their teaching practices.

The data analyzed in this paper were collected through focus group and individual interviews with PE teachers in the grades 7–9 within compulsory schools in Sweden. The data were analyzed using thematic analysis.

Four dominant themes were identified in the data: 1) Health as a healthy attitude, 2) Health as a functional ability, 3) Health as fitness, 4) Health as mental wellbeing. There is a clear impact from healthism and obesity discourses on the teachers' accounts of health, but there is also an impact from holistic views and approaches to health. The authors contend that teachers should be explicit in what they mean by health in relation to what they teach, how they teach and why they teach health in a certain way.

The knowledge produced by this study is crucial since teachers' assumptions regarding health affect the subject content (what), the pedagogies (how), as well as the reasons (why) they teach health and therefore what students learn regarding health.

This paper aims to argue that the limited success in addressing rising rates of obesity is underscored by health promotion practices and policies’ failure to consider the instrumental and symbolic functioning of food as part of identity formation, relationship construction and socio-cultural conditioning over consumers’ life course events. The aim of this paper is to ignite the power of critical approaches that seek social change through contextualising the subjectivities of obese individuals’ personal lived experiences with food.

Taking a transformative consumer research approach which recognises the range of theories and paradigms required to comprehend and positively influence well-being, this paper draws on the work of Foucault and Bourdieu to study the discourses of 21 obese adult consumers.

The research shows that food behaviours conducive to weight gain are enmeshed in participants’ biographies and everyday experiences across the arenas of identity, environment and the body. Transposable dispositions are formed across these arenas which often can be at odds with practices of self-care and frame how individuals use food in their responses to significant life occurrences.

The findings provide an avenue to potentially guide policymakers in shaping health-promotion programmes which assist consumers in self-regulation without compromising their relational identities, interests and self-knowledge.

This paper makes several important contributions to the managerial understanding of obesity, including the consideration of “obesogenecity” beyond its relativity to the temporal surroundings of “built” and social fields in the here and now, and more relative to the illimitable occasions, times, spaces or stages consumers traverse through their lives.

Purpose – This chapter explores how discourses of obesity as addiction are taken up by weight loss surgery patients and medical and scientific professionals.

Methodology/approach – Based on 14 semistructured interviews, I discuss the ways in which bariatric patients partially account for their presurgical bodies and contemporary struggles with weight loss and regain by referencing food addiction. This work is part of a larger project involving 35 interviews and participant-observation work and therefore these results should thus be considered preliminary.

Findings – I argue that bariatric patients and bariatric professionals portray weight loss surgery as an extraordinary tool that allows the “out of control” to become controllable. However, bariatric patients also emphasize the hard work that is entailed in both losing weight and maintaining a weight loss even after surgery.

Social implications – I suggest that this portrayal, in addition to being an accurate assessment of the potential for regain following weight loss surgery, is a technology of stigma management.

Originality/value – This work contributes to the sociology of the body and medical sociology literatures by illustrating that, within a neoliberal and anti-fat social context, highlighting the hard work involved in weight loss and weight maintenance allows bariatric patients to demonstrate proper subjectivity and thereby reclaim “proper selves” as they work toward a “proper bodies.”

Health policies often require individuals to limit behaviours deemed enjoyable or suffer other burdens. This leads to considerable and contested discourse often played out in the popular media. The aim of this study is to determine the effects of such contested media discourse on viewers' perceived attitude change towards the target behaviour.

Combining concepts from discourse analysis and marketing-psychology elaboration models, the authors undertook an online survey in which a large sample of the public (N = 855) watched parts of a real daytime news debate on the UK Sugar Tax. The authors then evaluated the effects of this discourse on the perceived understanding of the tax and perceived attitude change to the consumption of sugary drinks.

Participants differentiated between parts of the discourse related to facts and arguments (termed argument-related discourse devices) and parts related to the format and tone of the debate (termed debate-/speaker-related discourse devices). Contrary to what might be expected, debate-/speaker-related discourse devices, which might be thought of as subjective, appeared to effect positive perceived attitude change through a cognitive processing route that involved perceived improved understanding. The argument-related discourse devices, which may appear objective or rational, were not associated with perceived improved understanding but were directly associated with positive perceived attitude change.

Given the authors' interest in the relationship between discourse and perceived attitude change, the authors take the novel step of linking concepts from discourse analysis with models of attitude change taken from the marketing-psychology domain. Furthermore, the authors' large-scale survey “democratises” discourse analysis, allowing non-expert participants to reflect upon discourse.