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> Feeling bad about your weight is a good motivator to lose weight.

Educationalist here, actually it isn't :) For many people, this just makes you feel bad - and that's it. For that feeling to result in meaningful action a bunch of conditions have to be met, e.g. the absence of eating disorders (including things like stress eating etc.), a concept of self-efficacy (the idea that one actually is able to change out of one's own will), impulse control, knowledge about food and dieting, the time and money to eat healthier and so on. Often people are perfectly aware that their behaviour is unhealthy, but they lack one or more of those conditions. It therefore is better to focus on providing people the actual means to change (knowledge, methods, better food in school and at work, a supportive environment, taxation to make unhealthy food/drugs more expensive (a thing in the EU)).

Note that I'm fully in support of emphasizing the unhealthy aspects of obesity, though. Providing the facts often just isn't enough.

Some people don't respond to motivators, that isn't a reason to stop (generally) motivating.

My point was more that feeling bad, by itself, actually is a demotivator. I'm all for motivating! But that would mean emphasizing e.g. the health benefits, or positive reinforcement of actual lifestyle changes.

> Educationalist here, actually it isn't :) For many people, this just makes you feel bad - and that's it.

Are you just asking overweight people or are you asking all people? The people who are overweight today are obviously the group of people for which social pressure is ineffective. I'm talking about all people including the people who are successfully at a healthy weight.

Wait, why would we study people at a healthy weight whether or not shame is an effective strategy to lose weight? I am genuinely confused why someone at a healthy weight would be the person to ask, because for all we know they never had weight to lose.

Because if you stop the social pressure to be a healthy weight (ie, big is beautiful), people who used to maintain a healthy weight due to social pressure may no longer feel the need to do so.

This comment made me remember all of the anti-gay-marriage politicians saying that if we legalized gay marriage, men would just start leaving their wives and marrying men. As if the only thing keeping me from being fat or gay is some brave gatekeeper, rather than a lack of a desire (or makeup) to be fat or gay.

They also gave us insight into the mind of the gay anti-gay politician.

The difference is that the obesity doomsday predictions has already came true, and things are still getting worse every year. Today the median American is close to obese, and in some years will be obese unless something drastically changes. That would have been unthinkable 30 years ago when obesity was a tiny minority.

Do we have evidence that people who maintain a healthy weight do so primarily because of social pressure? I'm genuinely asking because I don't actually know that that's true. Most of the people I know of a healthy weight actually don't have a lot of shame about their bodies. In fact the most internal shamed people I know are either fat people or unhealthily thin people??

Most people of healthy weight would feel shame about their bodies if they got obese. They maintain healthy weight partly to avoid that shame.

How do you know that "healthy people would feel shame if they got obese" -> "healthy people use shame as a motivator to maintain weight"? Doesn't that rely on the assumption that shame works?... but that's precisely the thing I'm questioning. I don't actually know shame works because I don't see evidence that healthy weighted people have more shame, are more sensitive to shame, or are shamed more often than fat people. If anything fat people have the most shame, are the most sensitive to being shamed, and are publicly shamed more often... and they're still fat.

30 years ago you would have gotten shamed if you gained a few pounds, that early signal makes people think about eating habits earlier and makes many people never go into unhealthy weight in the first place.

So even though shame might not work to get fat people to lose weight, it could still work to keep people from ever getting fat. Getting shamed for a few pounds means that you can fix the source of shame by dieting for a few weeks, very doable for average people.

Where is the evidence that shame has a causational relationship with people getting fat? You're still only pointing to correlation and saying that because shaming was more common in the past, shaming is effective now. This implies that healthy weight people respond to shame more strongly than fat people or something, but that's just not true in my experience.

Anecdotally, I'd be way fatter if I was the last person on Earth. When all the Doritos were left, unattended.

I had overweight people in mind. For both cases I'd argue that emphasizing the benefits of healty weight and the means of getting to/staying at that weight is the more effective approach, though.

I've definitely have zero science on this and these are anecdotes so keep that in mind but I know a ton of people who maintain healthy weight so they look good in a bathing suit. I also know overweight people who are _only_ motivated to lose weight due to health concerns (and still really struggle but I've seen more movement from that angle), they also feel the social pressure but it's not effective.

I think it's important to not lose sight of the fact that maintaining a healthy weight is a challenge for nearly everyone and undermine what is currently working for those who are not overweight.

Furthermore, I think obesity has somehow found it's way to be more in line with the LGBT style movements of acceptance/tolerance instead of the changing view of addictions as disease instead of character flaws when it clearly should be much more like the latter.

"Feeling bad about your weight is a good motivator to lose weight"

Only if you think you have realistic chances of loosing that weight.

Otherwise that bad feeling will ... get eaten up.

Too little anxiety leads to laziness, but too much is crippling. Like most things you need to find the sweet spot.

Be anxious, not too much. Mostly over things within your control.