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Weight and HealthcareExamining weight science, weight stigma, and what evidence, ethics, and lived experience teach us about best healthcare practices and public health for higher weight people. Author: with Ragen Chastain
Examining the intersections of weight science, weight stigma, and healthcare and what evidence, ethics, and lived experience teach us about healthcare and public health best practices for higher-weight people. weightandhealthcare.substack.com Language: en Genres: Health & Fitness, Medicine Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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The Million Pound Challenge Part 2 - The Program
Saturday, 7 February, 2026
This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter! If you like what you are reading, please consider subscribing and/or sharing!In Part 1 we started discussing the “Million Pound Challenge” created by Toby Cosgrove and Dr. Michael Roizen in which they are “challenging” an unknown number of people to collectively lose one million pounds. In part 2 we’ll discuss the program itself. (If you haven’t read part 1, I recommend it to fully understand part 2.) As always I’ll indent the quotes from the website so that you can avoid harmful weight stigma if you choose. They explain the program as a 3-step process:Step 1: Enroll Your OrgRegister your health system. Get access to a variety of resources in the Million Pound Challenge Tool Kit for your entire team.Step 2: Your Staff, Your WayEmployees can use the tools provided, join their own programs, work with providers—whatever works. Your organization decides how to structure participation.Step 3: Track ProgressThe only requirement? Track results with a monthly check with your Challenge coordinator. Watch as individual effort becomes collective momentum toward one million pounds.This is where they make things incredibly clear - literally the only requirement is to track weight loss. This isn’t about health metrics, there is no way to make this program weight neutral or to focus on health - weight loss is the only metric and tracking it is the only thing the program requires.And when they blithely say “whatever works” let’s be clear that a century of research finds that, unless their goal is to create weight cycling, nothing does. So there is no common intervention and all they are tracking is weight loss. Right. And how is weight loss tracked? Per the FAQs (emphasis mine)“Your Challenge ambassador must log your team’s results monthly with your assigned Challenge Coordinator—this is the only requirement. Individual weights remain completely private. Only aggregate organizational totals are posted on the community leaderboard so you can see how your organization compares nationally.”Um, they aren’t private if you have to share them with your company’s challenge ambassador (and I have serious concerns that someone who would sign up for that job may be the last person that a coworker would want to tell their weight.) Workplace programs (or any programs) that include a weight loss component have significant risks to physical and mental health, including through eating disorders. But programs that compel people to compete solely on the basis of weight loss, as this one does, can actually encourage participation in dangerous behaviors in order to create weight loss.Measure your organization’s progress, celebrate your success stories, and recognize your top-performing teams. Join leaders at quarterly events, Chamber Summit, Aspen Ideas Festival, and HLTH to keep momentum strong.Do. Not. Do. This. Another huge issue with this, and all workplace/organization weight-loss challenges, besides the issues with disordered eating and eating disorders and weight cycling, is that it can single out people who aren’t participating or “achieving” in ways that create a hostile work environment for them. It can mean that those who have chosen an evidence-based weight-neutral path (either due to a history of eating disorders or other reasons) have to choose between their physical and mental health and being seen as “not a team player.” It can lead to organizations under valuing employees who, due to many reasons including disability, chronic illness, and more, cannot participate in the initiative at all (or in ways that make them “top-performing”) which can lead them to being seen by subordinates, peers, and bosses as a “drag” on the team or having less value to the organization. This is not surprising from someone like program co-founder Toby Cosgrove who once gleefully told the New York Times magazine that he didn’t want to hire higher-weight people (as the CEO of the Cleveland Clinic,) but let’s not follow in those bigoted footsteps.After 12 months, we’ll have collectively proven what we’ve known all along—that sustainable health outcomes are achievable. Winners celebrated at HLTH 2026. Every organization recognized for leading the revolution.There is so much wrong with this that I scarcely know where to begin. As I said in part 1, “prove” is a very strong word so I expect robust research and lots of it (spoiler alert - I’m going to be disappointed again, but in no way surprised, again.) These two doctors should know better than to suggest that anything about “sustainable health outcomes” can be “proven” by a random “challenge” that only lasts a year has no common intervention, and only measures weight loss. This does not have the ring of sound science. The truth is, we can’t even be sure how many of the participants would get thin enough that program co-founder Toby Cosgrove would think they deserved to be employed.I don’t want to spend too much time analyzing the deck chairs on this titanic of a “challenge” but I do want to look at one of the “resources” they offer, called ‘Why Healthy Employees Don’t Need Your Wellness Challenge.” First of all remember that this is NOT a wellness challenge (which would measure, you know, wellness) this is a weight loss challenge that only measures body size manipulation. Even if we ignore that, this “resource” is particularly horrifying, promoting the “Lifestyle 180” program. The program is based on the assumption that higher-weight people and those with chronic conditions are not already participating in health-supporting behaviors and should be “targeted”, by their employers (not their actual healthcare providers,) with “intensive, medically-integrated interventions.”Here again, this program teaches organizational leadership to see higher-weight people and those with chronic conditions as a liability to be solved and not as skilled and valuable employees, with the unspoken (except by Toby to the NYT magazine) takeaway to avoid hiring these people in the first place. This is likely to disproportionally impact higher-weight people, People of Color, and especially higher-weight People of Color. (Note that this is all wrapped up in the massive issues with U.S. employers providing healthcare which is, to use a technical term, a hot garbage mess that is beyond the scope of this post, but the idea that employers should have access to employee health information is obviously seriously problematic on its face.) The “resource” continuously suggests that employers focus on “the 20% of [ employees] driving 80% of the costs” ending with “that’s where you win.”My main takeaway from this resource was that if an employer sent me an email that said “Your recent health screening showed some concerning trends We have a program specifically designed for you. Can we talk?” I should say, emphatically, no. Which would also be my immediate answer if asked to participate in this “challenge.”In Part 3 we’ll talk about what you can do if your organization tries to push this kind of “challenge” on you.This month’s online workshop is Weight-Neutral Joint Pain Management with sports medicine physicians Dr. Julia Bruene and Dr. Jeremy Alland. There is a pay-what-you-can-afford option and a video will be sent to all registrants.Details and registration here!If you appreciate the content here, you can subscribe for free to get future posts delivered direct to your inbox, or choose a paid subscription to support the newsletter (and the work that goes into it!) and get special benefits! Click the Subscribe button below for details:Liked the piece? Share the piece!More researchThe Research PostMore resourcesThe Resource Post*Note on language: I use “fat” as a neutral descriptor as used by the fat activist community, I use “ob*se” and “overw*ight” to acknowledge that these are terms that were created to medicalize and pathologize fat bodies, with roots in racism and specifically anti-Blackness. Please read Sabrina Strings’ Fearing the Black Body – the Racial Origins of Fat Phobia and Da’Shaun Harrison’s Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness for more on this. Get full access to Weight and Healthcare at weightandhealthcare.substack.com/subscribe
