Respect for Any Body Size

NINA: Body size is on my mind because I’m thinking about how I present myself and how I’m perceived and how I can climb my own career ladder, and why haven’t I had success in some areas? And wondering whether or not people are listening to me or hearing me, or thinking that I have leadership presence so that I can be considered for other opportunities and even be promoted.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Nina’s a diversity and inclusion manager. In that job, she strives to create an environment where everybody’s accepted no matter who they are, including their race, age, gender, and weight.

AMY GALLO: Personally though, she says she’s been fighting to stay a size 12.

NINA: Oh gosh, the fight is, I think part of it’s because I’m mad at the clothing industry. It’s very hard to find clothes for work and going out and everything in a 14, not even the 24s and the 26s, but even in a size 14. And so, trying to not go higher than 12, so I don’t have to struggle with the clothing and being uncomfortable and not feeling confident.

AMY BERNSTEIN: That’s how she felt going back to work after having a baby.

NINA: When you’re pregnant, people have lots of empathy. After you’re pregnant, people are just like, “What’s wrong with you? Why isn’t the baby weight melting off?” And I was in a training position where I did orientation every few weeks, and so I’m in front of people and I want to wear a suit and look professional and energetic, and have people take me seriously, and I’m worried about parts of me spilling out.

AMY GALLO: She also started worrying about not fitting a mold.

NINA: I feel like there’s so many leaders around me who are thin, thin women, and I had never had a moment where someone said to me, “You’re a mess. Get it together.” But certainly seeing the women around me who are in leadership positions, even the top women at my previous employer, demanding careers, decades of accomplishments, and all thin and wearing certain designer clothes. And so, they’ve achieved all this and never gained 20 pounds and even when they had their kids or did stress eating. And so, it may not have been in the form of someone saying to me, “I can’t promote you because you look a certain way.” But it was in the messaging of the women who were in leadership roles around me.

AMY BERNSTEIN: But now that she’s in the leadership position just as she is, Nina’s not sure how much longer she’ll keep up that fight to stay a size 12.

NINA: Because I think that there are some things that just naturally happen with age and with menopause. I know I have to adjust. I’m going to try and accept my body, but also not completely give up. I’m still going to fight for my flexibility and my mobility, and to find clothes that make me feel good and fit well, and that I come into the office and people are like, “That woman knows what she’s talking about. She looks the part. She sounds the part. Yes.” And it’s going to be an everyday thing, that’s what I have realized, but I don’t want to beat myself up.

AMY GALLO: You’re listening to Women at Work from Harvard Business Review. I’m Amy Gallo.

AMY BERNSTEIN: I’m Amy Bernstein, and I have been where Nina is. She’s not the only woman who’s well aware that being in a larger body means living amid people’s weight bias and its consequences.

AMY GALLO: And Nina’s only a size 12. Two-thirds of women in the US wear a larger size than that. Being above what many healthcare providers consider a “normal weight” has economic costs for women. A study out of Vanderbilt University found that overweight women, regardless of the type of work they do, make 4% less than women of normal weight. For obese women, that penalty is 5.8%. For morbidly obese women, it’s 15.7%. That same study highlighted how women who are obese are less likely than normal weight women to have jobs that put them in front of clients and customers. That behind-the-scenes work pays less, approximately 22.3% less than work that involves negotiating or public speaking or consulting of some sort. And for the heaviest women who do hold those roles, the pay gap is greater. They make 34.5% less on average than normal weight women who are in the same type of client-facing jobs. Men on the other hand, aren’t hidden or shortchanged like that. Obese men on average don’t earn any less than normal weight men. And overweight men, in fact, earn a little more.

AMY BERNSTEIN: And those are only the financial consequences. We’re going to get into the many other ones like the mental toll, guided by two women who have put a lot of thought into what anti-fat bias is about and how to reduce it, not reinforce it. Grace Lemmon is a management professor at DePaul’s Business School. She recently published a roundup of the research findings on how larger bodied workers are stigmatized. In that paper, she writes about the damage caused by stereotypes, widespread misunderstanding of how weight works, and certain kinds of wellness programs. She wants more organizations to confront the stigma through interventions that raise awareness of it, which is exactly what Dr. Habibah Williams, she has a doctorate in nursing, did at the student health clinic where she used to work. Today, she’s a nurse practitioner at the University of Virginia’s inpatient abdominal transplant unit. She’s here, along with Grace, to help us understand our role in creating a positive body culture. Grace, Habibah, thank you both for joining us.

GRACE LEMMON: Oh, thank you so much.

HABIBAH WILLIAMS: Yes, thank you so much for having me.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Grace, let me start with you. How is it that you came to understand weight bias, especially the weight bias against women as the problem it is?

GRACE LEMMON: For me, it was really seeing weight bias outside the lens of economic bias. I’ve known for a while that when you are in a larger body, you’re going to have worse outcomes at work in terms of things like pay, promotions, and performance ratings, because this echoes what we see with other marginalized groups. If a stereotype attached to you relates to incompetence in any way, like we might see for a woman or for an older person, then it ultimately creates this economic disadvantage for you. But what I did not personally grasp and really helped me see the expanse of the problem was the interpersonal, the person to person mistreatment that goes on at work when you are in a larger body, and the fallout from that mistreatment. So, in my research, I found some 75% of people who self-identify as overweight, reported experiencing weight-based mistreatment, incivility, name calling, bullying, microaggressions, in the past six months explicitly because of their weight. And this was really jarring to me, but even more jarring was the repercussions. You, of course, when you’re mistreated at work might feel that burning shame, that immediate burning shame, but that was the tip of the iceberg. People who had been mistreated, who were stigmatized because of their weight at work, reported making career altering decisions because of that experience, leaning out at work, saying no to challenging work, saying no to promotions. I saw people report self-harm, drug use, alcohol abuse, even suicidal ideation. So, this was all very disturbing to me. And I would also like to add that in my research, people who are mistreated because of this weight stigma at work, seemed to not tell anybody. It was shameful and they were secretive about it and embarrassed. And if I could layer on just a little personal experience here, I’ve been in a larger body, I’ve been in a smaller body, so I’ve seen the ebbs and tides of how one is treated at work based upon body size. And earlier on in my career, I was absolutely mistreated, name called and bullied because of my weight, in a professional space. And I was talking to my husband about this last week. We’ve been together for nearly 20 years, and I asked him, “Did I ever tell you about these experiences? Did I ever tell you about the time in the meeting when somebody said I was stupid, expletive, expletive, and then called me a fat something.” I’m not going to repeat it. And he said, “No.” This is my best friend, my partner for life, I tell everything to, but I had never shared this, even though weight stigma and weight matters are such a large part of my research and my life. So, I carried that shame and secrecy with me, and I perhaps should not have been surprised that it was happening so often at work and in such a secret fashion. But nonetheless, the prevalence, the breadth, and the secrecy of weight bias really rung the alarm bell for me, that this is something we need to address in professional spaces.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah. Well, there’s a lot in there that I think we’ll come back to, but Habibah, tell us how you first recognized it as the problem it is.

HABIBAH WILLIAMS: Personal experiences and some training I was doing while I was going through school. We did an implicit racial bias project, and as a African American woman in this country, I struggled to understand how these biases were seen as implicit, because everything about my race is explicit. So, through this project, we used the Implicit Association Test, and I took, just playing around, took some tests, and I took the weight bias test. And so, when my test came back saying that I showed this level of weight bias, it started to help me better understand like, Oh, okay, this bias can be implicit. It wasn’t something I was aware of in myself, having always struggled with the idea of weight when I wasn’t overweight, but I was made to feel like I was, and then being overweight. And so, because of that, it mattered to me. I’m a healthcare professional, how can I have this implicit bias and not be aware if they’re coming through in my behaviors or my actions when I’m caring for the people that are trusting me to care for them? So, I became aware of my bias. It mattered to me to change the bias. So, that’s what I set out to do.

AMY GALLO: Yeah. That’s great.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Habibah, but can you tell us about that work, about that experiment?

HABIBAH WILLIAMS: Yeah. So, like I said, I first started off with the question of how to affect weight bias, how can we decrease weight bias in healthcare? And I wanted to make an intervention to help people with their bias, but then I realized that no, people just need to be made aware. And so, the intervention was designed to make people aware and to attempt to build empathy. We all know someone who is extremely small, way under what’s considered a normal BMI, who’s struggled to gain weight. And if there’s someone on one end of the spectrum that’s struggling to gain weight despite all they’ve tried, then there’s the opposite end of the spectrum of someone who’s struggling to lose weight despite all that they have tried. So, because I set my goal on awareness, ultimately most people who participated in the research project felt like they were definitely more aware of what weight bias was, and it’s something that they’re thinking about more, for sure.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So, tell us how your experiment affected your workplace. How did that all play out?

HABIBAH WILLIAMS: So, in the workplace, specifically, one thing that I did see in my environment is working at a small university healthcare center, the building that we were in was antiquated and old. The rooms were small. The exam tables were itty bitty. And one of the providers had a larger body student come in and to get on the exam table, and the exam table tipped forward as she tried to get on the table. And you could see the look of embarrassment on the student’s face. So, we had a conversation after our research, as to what we can do about just even our space, from just getting larger exam tables. And so, that was one thing. And then I don’t know that without the research and without weight bias and weight stigma being on the forefront of our minds and going through the intervention, if something like that would’ve been so readily addressed.

AMY GALLO: Grace, Amy B. and I both read the research roundup you wrote about weight at work, and among the many points that struck me was the finding that anti-fat bias, as you call it, is a prejudice that runs deeper than sexism, racism, and homophobia. What is that about?

GRACE LEMMON: This is something that I had to spend a good amount of time untangling myself, because I thought it was astounding that the world seems to be becoming better for a lot of marginalized groups, but not for people in larger bodies. And that’s frustrating. But I did uncover three reasons that I think really demonstrate clearly why, and the first is, weight compared to let’s say your gender or your race, is considered far more immediately controllable. I can’t snap my fingers and change my race. And we have an adage in most cultures, eat less, move more, and the problem that is your larger body will be solved. The reality is far more complicated.

AMY GALLO: Sure.

GRACE LEMMON: So, given that we think that weight is controllable and is a means toward realizing health for ourselves, it can feel natural, at least on the surface, to be judgmental about somebody’s size. I’ll also say that we have, as a culture, this idea of healthism that pervades how we think about what it means to be a good person or a bad person. So, healthism is this idea, it’s baked into many of our Western ideals of continuous self-improvement, responsibility for oneself. This idea that to be healthy you have to be the model of health. And we think the model of health includes having a slim or slender body. And as a culture, we feel pretty comfortable, day in and day out, calling out people who do not conform to these values that we hold near and dear to ourselves. So, combined with this idea that health is controllable and you are a good person for pursuing health, beauty ideals and their pressures seem to have a real stronghold on how we think about ourselves and judge ourselves, not just other people, we internalize a lot of this. And I want to note, this isn’t a new phenomenon, it’s always been in the water, it’s always been part of us, and it’s always been part of this broader conversation of currency and using our physical appearance as currency in society. So, it’s very hard for that to go away.

AMY GALLO: Yeah. And this idea that it’s a bias that we still find acceptable. At one point in your roundup, you talk about a possible intervention in a professional setting, of someone just saying, “Regardless of our weight, we all deserve respect.” And something about reading that sentence, I was like, Why is that shocking to me? If you inserted, “Regardless of our race. Regardless of our gender. Regardless of our sexual orientation.” It would’ve been completely normal to my ear, but it almost felt like the first time I read something like that.

GRACE LEMMON: And I might add there, we often don’t show ourselves respect with respect to our body image. And so, it made me feel unnatural to think about, oh, we’re giving respect to people of all sizes, because we don’t give respect to ourselves unconditionally. It’s tied oftentimes to our body size. And so, we extrapolate that inner experience to our outer experience.

AMY GALLO: Right. And the fact that our love for ourselves is conditional on our weight, sounds odd saying it out loud, but it’s 100% my experience and certainly the experience of many women I know. We had one of our readers, a larger body woman who emailed us, and she says that she tends to avoid public-facing opportunities, professional opportunities like presenting at a conference, because she worries that people won’t take her seriously. And I know this reflects, Grace, your research around people self-selecting out of professional opportunities, but I want to share what she wrote and just ask if you have any advice for her. So, she wrote, “Not participating has limited my opportunities for advancement. I feel enormous pressure to look a certain way in order to get ahead.” And so, she’s looking to hear how other larger bodied women are overcoming the self-doubt that she feels. Do either of you have any advice for her?

GRACE LEMMON: I’ll jump in here. I identify. I’ve been there. I could probably trace my decisions to go to academic conferences or seek out collaboration partners – or Habibah, to the research you’re doing, to even go to my yearly exam at the doctor, based upon how I felt about my body. So, you’re not alone. I’ve gone through therapy for these issues and the two most profound lessons that I’ve learned from therapy is opposite action and that you recognize you’re having a self-limiting belief; you’re not wanting to lean into this opportunity and you decide to do something the exact opposite, so that you’re not tacitly or explicitly confirming that the belief is something you need to act upon. So, it’s borrowing a page from mindfulness. You accept that you’re having this self-limiting belief, but it doesn’t mean that you have to act on it. And what I like to do for opposite action is I like to consider what are, in this context, my professional values? My professional values would be to display and communicate some expertise and collaborate with others. By leaning into presenting at this conference, I’m fulfilling that value and that can give me the boost, the motivation, the eagerness I need to say yes when my brain is screaming in a very habitual way to say no. So, opposite action is one thing. Sometimes that’s too hard.

AMY GALLO: Sure.

GRACE LEMMON: So, the second thing is if you hold a particular value of sharing and spreading your expertise and collaborating, and participating in these public conferences is too much, what are other ways in which you can realize your values, so you’re not leading a small life, a contained life, a life with really hard boundaries in it? How can you expand your boundaries just a little bit and live in a more… It sounds a little woo-woo, but it’s really not. It’s part of acceptance and commitment therapy. How can you live a life of value until you can build up that courage and excitement for doing opposite action?

AMY BERNSTEIN: Grace, can you tell us what that looked like for you, just to give us a demonstration?

GRACE LEMMON: Yeah, sure. So, for me, I’d have to think through one of my professional values, and that’s really helping people learn self-regulation strategies, how to project manage themselves so they have lower stress and more mindfulness in their life. And I could, for example, do a big conference at my university, where I invite a bunch of student groups to come and we talk about this, we engage with one another. I’m on stage, the spotlight is on me for a sustained period of time. And I just feel the cold spot running down my back the whole time, because in the background, my brain is thinking, “Oh my gosh, they’re judging how I look, they’re judging how I look. I do research on this, I know that they’re judging how I look.” And so, it just creates a really tense situation within me. And so, if I’m taking the, I wouldn’t say easier route, but my first step is to say, “Okay, if my passion is around teaching people how to self-regulate a little bit better, what are some other steps I can take while I learn to become aware of these self-limiting beliefs and catch and release them back in into the wild?” And so, for me, it was developing my own class at DePaul, which is just 30 students rather than 300 students. So, it’s a smaller stage. Once I found the courage to do that, then I developed a larger program with more students and more public-facing events. And so, I grew that as a way to display opposite action, to lean into the spotlight, even when everything inside of me was saying, “Go home, hide in your condo, don’t show your body, barely show your face on camera, and go forth in the world.” So, it was a process and it took many years to get there.

AMY GALLO: Yeah. And one of the things I notice about that is you’re not getting rid of the fact that people will judge you. You know that that’s going to be the case. It’s more accepting that that’s going to happen and still doing what you want to do anyway.

GRACE LEMMON: Absolutely. And I’m loathe to tell people, “You must do this.” But there is some internal work to do when you have these habitual impulses to lean out of life because of body consciousness and poor body image. It takes a lot of time and effort and it’s not what most people are doing, and so, it can feel lonesome as well, but it’s really the only way to confront those body-based self-limiting beliefs.

AMY GALLO: Sure. Habibah, what advice do you have for our listener?

HABIBAH WILLIAMS: I share in her struggles. I think when you deal with the internalization, it’s like your brain tells you that it’s everybody, everybody’s talking about you, everybody’s judging you, everybody. And the reality is, and I had to remind, it’s not everybody, but it may be a few individuals. I’ve worked with people who’ve told me, “Oh, fat people make me sick. They do this.” And I’m sitting here feeling like, “Are you looking at me?” He’s like, “Oh, oh, well, not you, not you. What do you mean?” People can be so insensitive of your struggles. I find myself avoiding the camera, avoiding the outing. I want to possibly catapult myself into the world of expert speaking on this subject, but because I still have these struggles, I’ve been less involved in trying to make that happen. But I have to remind myself, I think the more you accomplish things that you didn’t think you could do, it just builds your confidence to do the next thing. So, like Grace said, because I was thinking when she was talking, she created her own class of 30 people, something she was comfortable with. And that was my thought for this listener, take on something, create it. And then if she’s able to do that and to step up there and to… It’s sad to think that we have to do these things to earn the respect and everything, but if she gets up there and does the things she thinks she can’t do, speaks her expertise, there’s someone else in the audience that thought they couldn’t do it, that’s watching her do it, and now they’re gaining the confidence that they can in turn do it too. And growing up as a marginalized minority in this country, it’s everything. Representation matters. It matters to see someone doing something that you did not think was possible, and do it, right? And so, I just tell myself to do it, to just do it. The bias is going to be there. And the funny thing is, is that with internalization, the bias may not be there. We internalize that it’s there because we know that we are not what people are looking for. That’s what the world has told us. And it’s a lie. It’s a lie to think that someone prefers one aesthetic all the time. It’s a lie to think that there’s not people out there who admire and adore someone who’s in a larger body size. It’s a lie. It baffles me that people think that one aesthetic fits all. And I love seeing the body positive movements that we have, the more inclusive advertising that some people are being extremely intentional about doing. I hope that people are seeing how much representation matters so much. So, for me, that’s part of it. If someone sees me doing it, like getting my doctorate, that was never something that I thought I could do. Coming from where I come from, I didn’t see it. Then I had a cousin do it and I thought, She could do it, I could do it. And I think if she can think about things from that level, maybe that can be some motivation. It definitely motivates me.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So, we’ve been talking about how to be more sensitive to the experiences of larger bodied women we work with, but I also want to point out, as one of our readers did, the need to be sensitive to how we talk about food and weight, because you just never know what people are dealing with. The reader, Anna, spoke with our producer about her experiences and we’re going to hear moments of that conversation.

ANNA: There are some weird things that happen when you’re a smaller person at work and the way people feel like it’s perfectly okay to talk about your body, and the things that people will say to you. And they don’t think that it’s hurtful or mean, because you’re small. I had one of my male colleagues, we were in a meeting and that conference room was icy cold, and I did this small talk comment about it being cold. And he said, “Well, you’d probably be warmer if you ate a sandwich.” And I was mortified, as were I think, most of the other people in the room. But it’s like everybody laughs it off because it’s not mean if you say it to a skinny person. It’s the little things like that, like if I don’t take a cookie when someone brings cookies in, people will comment on it. I’ve been put very publicly in my place about not taking a cookie, by a superior at one point. I was like, “No, thank you. I’m good.” And she was like, “Oh, you don’t want a cookie. Why wouldn’t you want a cookie?” And I was like, “I don’t want a cookie today.” And then she sits back down and she goes, “Well, everybody remember, Anna doesn’t want cookies, so please don’t offer her a cookie.” It was awful. So, I will usually not take a cookie. I’m often restricting what I’m eating. I’ve struggled with eating disorders and probably, I still participate in some eating disorder behaviors, like constantly dieting. For me, this is the first time, really in the last two or three years that I’ve just decided to acknowledge that that is something I live with, probably because I’m confident enough that nobody’s going to fire me for it. But also, it has helped my coworkers understand where I’m coming from. Like today, one of my good friends is leaving, her last day is Friday, and she had her husband make lasagna and garlic bread and bring it in. And I did my absolute best and I got the smallest possible portion of lasagna and a little piece of garlic bread. And as soon as I sat down, the gal to my left was like, “Oh, you eat like such a bird.” And then I was asked by one of the other directors if I was on a diet and I just said, “Brad, I’m basically always dieting.” He was like, “Oh, okay, I’ll let it go.” It’s like, “Okay.” A lot of women who have eating disorders are engaged in some sort of eating disordered behavior. If we talked about it a little bit more, maybe we would all understand that we have a lot more baggage around food, regardless of what size we are, and a lot more baggage around our size than meets the eye.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So, it seems like people think it’s okay to comment on women’s bodies and their eating habits. So, what’s that about?

HABIBAH WILLIAMS: I think it’s like white noise. I think it’s like small talk that we feel we must say and fill the spaces for some reason. I also believe it’s self-serving, when you see a thin person, someone considered thin, you assume they’ve always been thin. So, if we’re a bigger person, then the comments are to make them feel bad because of how we feel about ourselves. And the example of being offered a cookie, if I’m offered a cookie as a smaller person, so what does it say about me as a larger person to accept the cookie? So, now I’ve internalized you not wanting a cookie, and if I want a cookie, well, what does it say about me? I feel like we’re all guilty of these behaviors, and that’s why I wanted to focus on just making people aware. And so, I believe in the DEI efforts moving forward, need to focus a little more on weight, the same way we’ve made sexual harassment such a thing. We do annual education. You know what to say and what not to say when you’re in these social environments. But because weight has been our secret shame, it hasn’t been talked about, it hasn’t been addressed. We’re starting to get smarter about it. Starting to understand that you can’t just say anything about anybody without affecting their feelings. So, I believe when weight is addressed in the DEI environment a little more often, then things can start to change in the workplace.

AMY GALLO: Right. Grace, what’s your take on why we feel so comfortable commenting on women’s eating habits and body size?

GRACE LEMMON: A lot of us, we internalize this fear of being fat or being thought of as being fat and all of the stereotypes that go along with it. And this fear of appearing unhealthy, because that’s what a lot of people assume if you are in a larger body. So, because we fear this fatness, we don’t push back when somebody comments on what we’re doing with our bodies, because we think in some ways maybe we deserve to hear it, maybe we deserve that shame. And so, we don’t gently correct or not so gently correct a coworker on the inappropriateness of such a comment about what you are or are not eating in the workplace, because again, it echoes the conversation we’re having inside of ourselves about our own eating behaviors. Anna, she talked about within herself, she has some disordered eating, which alongside disordered eating comes ruminative conversation, policing what you are and are not eating. And so, to hear somebody else at work say those same things, it’s hurtful, but I don’t think it’s actually jarring and it doesn’t incite within you this motivation to correct them, because it’s just what we are accustomed to. It’s the white noise around us. So, I don’t mean to put the burden of correction just on larger people or just on notably smaller people. I believe that we all have some responsibility to be aware of and recognize certain conversations around eating habits and body size as no longer appropriate for the workplace, out of respect for people’s own internal processing of their body image. Again, to Habibah’s point.

AMY GALLO: Yeah. So, let’s get really practical then. So, when someone says something like they did to Anna and you’re present, what could we say to counter or to interrupt that bias?

GRACE LEMMON: If I overheard that conversation, I might say something like, “That seems like a very personal comment. Subject change.” So, I’m very short and sweet about it, but I want to convey it’s none of our business what Anna does or does not eat, what she’s feeling about her body. It’s just none of my business because I have no idea what’s going on in her brain or her day. Mind your own business, at the end of the day. And so, whether I should or should not be, I try to be very pleasant about it, because this is such a sensitive conversation and it is such a part of social connection to gripe about our bodies, to talk about plans we have for our bodies, the cleanse we’re doing, the hike we’re doing, whatever it may be, and how it’s going to transform us into a different looking rather than different feeling human being. And so, I try to be pleasant because people are not accustomed to a ton of bricks coming down on them if they happen to say, “Oh, why don’t you want the cookie?” But I do think that there needs to be a hard boundary about what is and is not your business. So, I think we can all be that for our fellow coworkers.

AMY GALLO: Yeah. Well, and I think coming down like a ton of bricks on someone who makes that comment contributes to their shame, which as the research shows does not contribute to behavior change, instead leads to counterproductive behavior.

AMY BERNSTEIN: What should we do, how should we respond, when we hear a colleague make a disparaging comment about her own body? I’ve been this person, I reach for a cookie, I gobble it down and then maybe even reach for a second one. And that’s when I might say out loud, “Oh my God, why did I do that to myself?” What do we say that doesn’t feed into the weight bias? What could you say to me that would take me out of that shame spiral I’m in?

GRACE LEMMON: Sure. I might put just a little thread of a different idea in your brain. I might say something like, “When I eat cookies, I feel a little boost of energy from the sugar and I’m a little more focused.” Just trying to insert an alternative or different association with the very pleasurable act of eating a cookie. We eat the cookie because it’s pleasurable and we need to reassociate the consumption of that cookie with pleasure. And then you take one, and then I would take one myself and say, “Cheers.” Or something. If I were feeling it. Just something like that, to reassociate what it means to consume.

AMY GALLO: Yeah, you’re disassociating it from the weight issue, right? You’re connecting it to the reason we actually got the cookie, which is that, cookies are delicious. And so, why not just focus on that? And I also wonder if you could say something like, “I sometimes beat myself up too, but I actually really love cookies and I’m sick of feeling shame about that.”

GRACE LEMMON: Yes.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Why not?

AMY GALLO: Yeah. Well, and I do think when you’re trying to educate people about bias, it’s helpful to talk about your transformation or your journey from one thought to another, because it shows there’s a path, and it also doesn’t hold you up as this virtuous person who always believed you had no anti-fat bias. So, instead you’re saying, “Yeah, I thought those things about myself or about others, too, and now here’s what I’m trying to think and focus on instead.”

GRACE LEMMON: Exactly.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So, as Anna was saying, we’ve a lot more baggage around our size than meets the eye. What do you wish managers knew about the baggage that many women carry with them into work? Habibah, thoughts?

HABIBAH WILLIAMS: I think the most important thing to understand is internalization. When you talk about weight bias, everything is internalized. So, being that person who, if you witnessed it, to correct the behavior, just like you would anything else. And someone’s not going to let you say something sexually inappropriate in the workplace and get away with it, and we need to start treating situations with weight discrimination, weight bias, the same. It’s not going to be tolerated. And so, for me, I think the biggest thing in the workplace from an HR standpoint, from a management standpoint, is to add weight discrimination to the DEI conversation. It has to be like, you can work on diversity, but if I am living in a larger body as a Black woman and I see another Black woman who looked like she was plucked out of a magazine, it’s great that I see her, but I think the other side is it’s really just representation. So, it’s almost like you’re saying, “Yeah, we believe in diversity, but you have to look a certain way.” And so, to expound on their definition of diversity is what I need for HR and management to do. In my experience, I haven’t seen any of the new hires or anyone representing any diversity in body shape. And once again, because weight is seen as the moral failure on the person living in the larger body, it’s not something that we feel like we have to move on, it’s not something that we feel like we have to be inclusive with, but I really need the conversation to start changing, to recognize that these are the bodies that we’re in and we can be healthy within this body.

GRACE LEMMON: Absolutely.

AMY GALLO: Yeah. One of the things that we’ve covered in some HBR articles around DEI and around trying to raise managers’ awareness of bias is something called priming. So, before you get into a conversation about performance reviews for your employees, for example, is acknowledging that bias might creep into the discussion, racial bias, gender bias, but I’ve never heard that used around weight bias. And wouldn’t it be wonderful if managers, before they were making compensation decisions, before they were making promotion decisions, were made to be aware that this might play a role and therefore, to watch out for it?

GRACE LEMMON: Yep.

AMY GALLO: Because I think we often think of the consequence of the weight bias of being someone’s feelings. And this conversation has just raised my own awareness that it’s so much more than that. It’s not about whether you’re hurting someone’s feelings, which we should take seriously too, but it has such broader consequences.

GRACE LEMMON: Oh yeah.

AMY GALLO: I do want to return to Nina, who we heard from, the diversity and inclusion manager, and she’s only a few months into her new job, but she said she’d like to do some of these company-wide initiatives that we’re alluding to, that encourage employees to live both a healthy lifestyle and accept anyone of any size. Any advice for her on achieving both those goals at the same time, encouraging healthy living, but also making sure we accept whatever the result of that healthy living is in terms of people’s body size?

GRACE LEMMON: So, one piece of advice that I could provide to Nina is to, number one, realize that what health means to people is very specific and intrinsic to them. So, any type of one-size-fits-all program, even something as basic as a steps program, which I know a lot of workplaces have, that may not be the way to realize health for everybody. So, the way in which you talk about health, the extent to which people can personalize and individualized what a holistic view of health looks like for them, rather than having to do specific directives, the more productive and more responsive I believe employees will be. And in that way, you’re sowing the seeds there of, we all have different journeys, we all have different paths, we are all individual people and therefore, we all have different sizes. And so, implicitly, you’re also talking about this acceptance of not only approach to health, but manifestations of health in the workplace. I would also add, any intervention or suggestion you want to provide to employees can again circle back to not reducing their body size, but how can they be more comfortable, energetic, refreshed, relaxed, lower stressed in their body? How can they in a more holistic way… again, not to be woo-woo, but our ideas of wellbeing are often narrowly constrained to weight, because there is so much cultural pressure to be slim, but what brings us wellbeing is so much broader than that. And you can leave weight out of the conversation and still have an absolutely complete, healthy lifestyle HR program running in the workplace.

AMY GALLO: Yeah.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Grace, Habibah, thank you so much.

HABIBAH WILLIAMS: Thank you.

AMY GALLO: Yes, thank you both. This has just been such an eye-opening conversation and such an important one. I’m glad we’re bringing this out of the secrecy zone and more into the public realm.

GRACE LEMMON: It was a pleasure. Thank you so much.

AMY GALLO: That’s our show. I’m Amy Gallo.

AMY BERNSTEIN: I’m Amy Bernstein. If you want to take the Implicit Association Test for weight that Habibah was talking about, you can find it by going to implicit.harvard.edu.

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