Fear of Gaining Weight

What the fear is a fear of

The 2008 encyclopedia of phobias gives pocrescophobia a single line. The social stigma of obesity is bias or discriminatory behaviour directed at overweight and obese people because of their weight, and the encyclopedic account is specific about its duration and its cost. It can span an entire life for as long as excess weight is present, beginning young and lasting into adulthood.

The measured outcomes are these: fat people marry less often, have fewer educational and career opportunities, and on average earn less than people of what the source calls normal weight. Public support for disability services, civil rights protection and anti-discrimination law in employment has grown over the years, and the discrimination continues.

A person afraid of gaining weight is therefore afraid of something real, well documented and enforced by other people. That is an unusual position for an entry in this catalogue, and it is the reason the diagnostic question here cannot be settled by asking whether the fear is warranted.

Whether the stigma causes some harm

The account goes one step further and the step is worth marking. The significant negative physiological effects associated with obesity, it says, may be caused in part by the stress of the stigma, or may be made more pronounced by that stress.

If that holds, some part of what is treated as the medical consequence of a body is the medical consequence of how that body is treated. It also complicates the fear in an unpleasant way: a person afraid of the health effects of gaining weight is partly afraid of what the fear itself, held by everybody around them, will do to them.

Where it stops being a reasonable expectation

The Cleveland Clinic's page, last reviewed in March 2022, draws the line by behaviour rather than by belief. Many people think about their weight and diet often, and that is not obesophobia, any more than careful eating is Orthorexia. What distinguishes it is going to extremes:

• undereating
• starving
• exercising past any purpose
• avoiding activities that involve food

And one sentence settles it. People with obesophobia may continue to fear weight gain even when they are underweight or malnourished.

A fear that persists in the face of the opposite condition is no longer tracking anything in the world. That is the test the entry turns on, and it is a cleaner one than proportionality, which is hard to apply when the feared penalty is real.

Why avoiding meals has its own cost

The last item on the avoidance list is the one with a social cost of its own. Meals are where a great deal of ordinary company happens, and somebody avoiding every occasion that involves eating is not only eating less. They are seeing fewer people.

That produces the pattern this catalogue records repeatedly: a fear of a social penalty producing a withdrawal that imposes it by another route.