In this issue:

• Upcoming Events!

• Book Review: Fearing the Black Body by Sabrina Strings + Belly of the Beast by Da’Shaun Harrison

Upcoming Events

Size Inclusive Pediatric Medicine

Thursday, October 30 at 12:00-1:30pm EST (via Zoom)

Join MSSI and AWSIM to learn about the harms of weight-centric care in pediatrics, and to explore how weight-inclusive approaches can provide a refreshing alternative framework of care that uplifts children, their families, and their care teams. The session will include an initial presentation of the evidence behind the weight-inclusive approach, followed by a panel discussion with physicians who practice weight-inclusive healthcare with pediatric populations.

Learning objectives:

1. Defining the problem – Establish the existence of weight stigma in pediatric healthcare 

2. So What? – Review the harms perpetuated by weight stigma in pediatrics

3. Taking action – The case for providing weight/size inclusive pediatric healthcare

Speakers:

AWSIM Fall Symposium 2025

Friday, October 24th, 12-5pm ET

All eyes on the upcoming AWSIM Fall Symposium! Hear from a variety of speakers on relevant topics within weight inclusive care. Join AWSIM for an afternoon of connection, learning, and collective care, centered on what it means to show up for our patients and for each other in this work.

Main Sessions:

• Weight Inclusive Medicine presented by AWSIM Board (1 hr)

• Topics in Clinical Practice (1 hr)

• Weight Inclusive Care and Medical Education (1 hr)

• Advocacy and Lived Experience Panel (1 hr)

• Breakout sessions & Networking (1 hr)

FREE for students and AWSIM members!

Introduction to Health at Every Size® by ASDAH

Thursday, October 23, 2025, 1:00-2:00pm ET

Since the Fat Liberation movement began in the 1960s, activists have provided critical analyses about how weight is used in accessing, and the provision of, healthcare. This critique developed into what would eventually be called the Health at Every Size® (HAES®) Principles, drawing thousands of healthcare professionals to reconsider what is accepted as care for people in larger bodies.

The Health at Every Size® approach to healthcare is based on four Health at Every Size® Principles and a Framework of Care. Together they provide a path for healthcare providers to learn about and practice ethical and effective care for larger people. This session will introduce the four principles and ten components of the framework to serve as the foundation of Health at Every Size®-aligned care.

This session is designed for healthcare providers who are brand new to Health at Every Size® but we welcome everyone to join in the conversation!

MSSI Advocacy in Clerkships and Residency Interviews

Thursday, November 6, 2025, 8:00pm ET (via Zoom)

Medical Students for Size Inclusivity (MSSI) is hosting this event to foster connection and communication between student advocates as residency interview season begins and as other students continue to work hard on their clinical rotations. As advocates, we often find ourselves in conversations with those whose views or beliefs may not be aligned with our own. While such conversations can be an important part of advancing any important cause, this dynamic can be especially challenging when being evaluated, such as during interviews and clerkships. As the leaders of MSSI, we want to provide a place for medical students to share experiences and tips for speaking about their advocacy work in interviews or in clinical settings so other students can feel empowered and supported as we all take the next step in our medical careers.

Book Review: Fearing the Black Body by Sabrina Strings and Belly of the Beast by Da’Shaun Harrison

By MSSI member Jay Liu (Stanford University)

While preparing for board exams this summer, I found myself turning towards reading as a way to recharge and finished several books that had been high on my list, namely Sabrina String’s Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fatphobia and Da’Shaun Harrison’s Belly of the Beast. Together, they offer a rigorous interrogation of the historical and contemporary entanglements of race, fatness, and medical discourse. Challenging dominant assumptions about body size and health, Strings and Harrison position fatphobia not as an individual concern, but as a structural system of oppression rooted in anti-Blackness.

Fearing the Black Body draws on art, literature, religious doctrine, and medical texts to trace the evolution of European and American cultural attitudes toward body size. Renaissance artists idolized the “plump” female form as an aesthetic embodiment of the divine, but a cultural preference for leanness emerged alongside European colonial expansion and the transatlantic slave trade. As easier access to sugar through the slave trade transformed a substance formerly limited to aristocrats into a publicly accessible good, food restriction (and the leaner bodies that could, in some cases, result) became fashionable among the white European elite as a demonstration of religious, moral, and intellectual superiority. Together with the “discovery” of southern African women with naturally robust bodies (Saartjie Baartman as the famous example), fatness became increasingly linked with Blackness, and a larger body with moral, intellectual, and physical inferiority. Within the North American colonies too, thinness was promoted by the church, popular magazines, and eugenicists as an indication of both race and class distinction. 

Medicine didn’t involve itself in the topic of body size until the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At its onset, greatest concern was placed on the weak, sickly frames of the white American elite, occupied by an obsession with thinness at all costs (notably, medical professionals were unconcerned with the health of Black women or other people of color). However, modern medicine evolved in conversation with dominant cultural, religious, and scientific powers, and by the early twentieth century, cultural fatphobia had become codified into the medical discourse.

Our contemporary cultural and medical obsession with thinness is rooted in anti-Blackness and has culminated in the contemporary “o**sity epidemic,” a narrative Strings argues is less scientific truth than cultural myth. The epidemic was famously launched off an infamous CDC article warning that “o**sity” is a significant (and presumably reversible) cause of death in the American population, illustrating its point with a photograph of a larger-bodied black woman being measured by a provider with thin white hands. Despite internal objections raised within the CDC as to the study’s methods and conclusions, mounting scientific evidence that excessive weight loss is unsustainable, and demonstration that health-supporting behaviors and communities impact morbidity and mortality independent of any weight loss, the “o**sity epidemic” captured global and cultural attention, perpetuating racial and class hierarchies under the guise of health promotion. 

Harrison’s Belly of the Beast builds on this foundation by examining the lived experience of fat Black men within a society that simultaneously eroticizes and criminalizes their bodies. Equal parts vulnerable and revolutionary, Harrison begins their narrative by unraveling the sexual and gender politics of their assault at the hands of a babysitter. They transition to an analysis of the sizeism inherent in cultural debates surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement, arguing that fatphobia operates as a form of state-sanctioned violence, evident both in patterns of police brutality and medical neglect. Victims of police violence, Harrison points out, were to be reliably described by their murderers in subsequent investigations as “large” and therefore “threatening,” their deaths taking place in the context of a cultural narrative that paints the large Black man as a “beast” to be caged and conquered. “Health” is also perverted to justify death, echoing dominant cultural representations of health as a choice/responsibility, and poor health as a personal and moral failing: Had George Floyd not had asthma or cardiovascular disease, Harrison writes, his murderers claim he could have survived the extended choke hold in which he was placed. What Floyd was NOT though, before being placed in a police chokehold, was both sick and dead. Harrison ultimately rejects depoliticized calls for “body positivity,” instead advancing a radical framework that demands dismantling the structural conditions—racism, ableism, cisnormativity, and capitalism—that sustain body-based oppression.

Together, Fearing the Black Body and Belly of the Beast critically reframe fatness as a category deeply shaped by racialization and power, underscoring the necessity of interrogating weight stigma not merely as bias, but as an institutionalized practice with direct consequences for patient care and health equity. They are essential reads for the size-inclusive practitioner.

This newsletter was authored by MSSI members Jay Liu (Stanford University) and Sophie Lalonde-Bester (University of Alberta).