The Power of Fat Joy: Why Weight-Inclusive Care Needs More Than Naming Harm
This year’s Weight Stigma Awareness Week theme surprised me in the best way: “The Power of Fat Joy.”
If you’ve read anything I’ve written about weight stigma over the past decade or so, you know my writing tends to live in the harm. The research. The discrimination. The impact. The stories from my clients about doctors who wouldn’t look past a number on a chart. Weight stigma still shapes who gets believed, who gets access to respectful care, and who walks out of an appointment feeling supported (or not).
Joy as Its Own Full, Legitimate Birthright
This year, Weight Stigma Awareness Week is making a deliberate shift, and I love it.
WSAW 2026 is centering the joy, creativity, and community of fat people. Not joy as a “look on the bright side.” Joy as its own full, legitimate birthright.
I’ll be honest, as a clinician, I rarely write about joy. And when it comes to weight stigma it’s often about providing education and offering support: helping a client find language to advocate for themselves in a medical appointment, helping them unlearn the idea that their body is a problem to be solved before their life can start, teaching clinicians how to provide weight inclusive treatment.
Don’t get me wrong, I still believe that is essential work. But somewhere in the necessary, important work of naming harm, I was focused on a partial story.
Some of the most powerful moments with clients are the joyful moments when life is being LIVED! A client showing me a photo of herself in her favorite outfit and how at home in her body she felt in it. Another client describing how much her niece loves cuddly up on her soft, squishy lap and how good that made her feel. These are not insignificant moments – they are the whole point!
That’s why I appreciate WSAW shifting the conversation this year.
About Weight Stigma Awareness Week 2026
This year’s free virtual events, created and co-hosted by The Body Equity Alliance and Within Health, are happening September 8–9, 2026, with sessions on reclaiming fat power in healthcare, healing intergenerational body shame, and claiming fat joy as a birthright. You can earn CEUs, hear from advocates, clinicians and people with lived experience, and – maybe most importantly – spend a couple of days in community with people who already know that joy and justice aren’t separate projects.
But…I can’t say goodbye without doing a little harm reduction work too. We entered this work to help, not hurt, our clients. If you are still questioning whether your weight-centric training might be getting in the way of offering deeper healing to your clients, I am SO glad you are here. While our own internalized weight stigma is not “our fault” it is our responsibility.
Fat joy isn’t the absence of stigma. But stigma can’t eradicate it.
My free guide, Weight Stigma in Dietetics Practice, walks you through what weight stigma actually is, how it shows up in your own clinical perception, and concrete tools to address it in your nutrition counseling work. It’s a quick read, and if you haven’t already downloaded a copy, be sure to grab it here.