Foucault Goes to Weight Watchers

Heyes, Cressida J.

doi:10.2979/hyp.2006.21.2.126

Cited by 36 publications

(56 citation statements)

References 4 publications

(2 reference statements)

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“…However, rather than presenting individuals who are confident about independently managing their weight, this study highlights how participants in fact preferred control to be removed from them and for their dietary behaviours to be governed by a figure of authority who they feel 'knows best'. In commercial programmes such as Weight Watchers this behaviour is encouraged and are informed they will 'always be a Weight Watcher', implying an ontological state which can never be broken (Heyes, 2006). However, this level of practitioner dependence is excessive and deflects patients' responsibilities for their own health away from them.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A qualitative evaluation of an NHS Weight Management Programme for obese patients in Liverpool

Webb

Davies

Johnson³

et al. 2014

Nutrition &Amp; Food Science

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Purpose – The increasing prevalence of obesity in the UK has been of concern for some time. This is particularly true in Liverpool and in response the Liverpool Weight Management Programme (LWMP) was devised. It offers a service involving dietitians and other expert agencies working towards facilitating dietary and lifestyle changes in obese NHS patients in Liverpool via a 12-week education programme. This qualitative study aims to investigate patients' experiences of the LWMP. Design/methodology/approach – Informed volunteers participated in focus groups exploring their experiences following the programme. Focus groups were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim, then analysed following a thematic approach utilising constant comparison analysis to allow a qualitative view of the LWMP to be formed. Findings – Participants described an increase in immediate self-confidence during the LWMP, as opposed to coercion and pressure experienced elsewhere. The results also show the implementation of dietary changes by participants and favourable opinions towards both the group settings and patient-centred care. Participants also positively described the LWMP regarding the programmes social approach and aspects of programme content; however, there were issues with over-dependence on healthcare professionals. Healthcare professionals also need to recognise that long-term empowerment may still be lacking and that follow-up support and the effectiveness of some areas of programme content need to be considered to ensure patients benefit from sustainable weight management. Originality/value – This paper addresses an identified need for qualitative research in the area of health service weight management programmes and highlights the importance of long-term support in empowering patients by exploring their lived experience of the LWMP.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A qualitative evaluation of an NHS Weight Management Programme for obese patients in Liverpool

Webb

Davies

Johnson³

et al. 2014

Nutrition &Amp; Food Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…At the same time though, as I felt, they encouraged our participation in networks of power that constrain us and might decrease our will or ability to exercise our capacities in the future [12]. That these networks of power are not just external (between us and the world) but also internal (between us and our selves) is what made a first-person evaluation so compelling yet simultaneously complex.…”

Section: Continuing Improvementmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As a researcher seeking to modify my body how could I be both a participant in systems like these-systems backed by what I saw as rationalist agendas threatening self-knowledge, intuition and reliance-and still champion a resistance against them? How could I inhabit and speak from what [12] refers to as the normalised position of a diet participant, and one of a resister?…”

Section: Beginningmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Anxious Alliance

Williams

2015

AAHCC

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This essay presents a multi-year autoethnographic perspective on the use of personal fitness and self-tracking technologies to lose weight. In doing so, it examines the rich and contradictory relationships with ourselves and our world that are generated around these systems, and argues that the efforts to gain control and understanding of one's self through them need not be read as a capitulation to rationalizing forces, or the embrace of utopian ideals, but as an ongoing negotiation of the boundaries and meanings of self within an anxious alliance of knowledge, bodies, devices, and data. I discuss how my widening inquiry into these tools and practices took me from a solitary practice and into a community of fellow travellers, and from the pursuit of a single body goal into a continually renewing project of personal possibility.

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“…Post-swim, however, she looked back on this habitual weighing as a bit pyscho and didn t return to her daily weigh-in. Another female swimmer spoke of the unexpected pleasure she found in the solidity of her heavier body, its occupation of space, and the unanticipated freedoms of no longer obsessing over food There is a strong gender dimension to these transformations, since it is women who are the primary targets and consumers of the weight loss industry, and for whom the practices of close self-surveillance, guilt and obsession are a normalized aspect of femininity (Bordo, 1993;Heyes, 2006). Even among those swimmers who were planning to lose weight after the swim season was over, the interviews and fieldnotes are full of examples of new-found pleasures in the freedoms of being able to eat without guilt or self-recrimination that cannot simply be understood as playful transgression.…”

Section: Unsettling Heroic Fatnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘You can’t be too vain to gain if you want to swim the Channel’: Marathon swimming and the construction of heroic fatness

Throsby

2013

International Review for the Sociology of Sport

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The fat body and the sporting body are conventionally understood as mutually exclusive, coming together only in sport-based weight-loss interventions. However, the sport of marathon swimming relies upon body fat as a performance advantage, and weight maintenance and gain are a common element of the training process. The concept of ‘heroic fatness’ offers (some) swimmers a means of negotiating this anomalous sporting embodiment, positioning swimming fat as an undesirable necessity, nobly, but provisionally, borne. The paper argues that this construction is made possible through the construction of swimming fat as fake and as separate from the self. However, the paper unsettles this ideal-type of heroic fatness through the identification of the exclusions upon which it relies, both in terms of gender, and in relation to those who are already fat at the start of training. This opens up the possibility of more ambivalent modes of fatness that run counter to both heroic fatness and its unheroic counterpart – the very ‘real’ fatness that is the target of instrumentalist sport-based weight-loss interventions.

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Foucault Goes to Weight Watchers

Cited by 36 publications

References 4 publications

A qualitative evaluation of an NHS Weight Management Programme for obese patients in Liverpool

A qualitative evaluation of an NHS Weight Management Programme for obese patients in Liverpool

An Anxious Alliance

‘You can’t be too vain to gain if you want to swim the Channel’: Marathon swimming and the construction of heroic fatness

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