Fatima Cody Stanford: changing the narrative on obesity

Abstract

Fatima Cody Stanford is an obesity medicine physician and scientist who uses her public platform to change the conversation surrounding obesity. She challenges conventional framings of obesity, such as flawed notions of individual moral failing or that it is only about physical activity and consumption of food, and instead calls for obesity to be recognised as the complex, relapsing-remitting multifactorial disease that it is. As Associate Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston, MA, USA, Stanford takes an integrated approach to obesity that combines clinical care, research, health policy, health disparities, and public health approaches. As Stanford comments, ”I have to convince people that obesity actually is a disease. Yes, I must tailor to each individual patient. But from a population perspective, change the narrative about this very visible disease. As obesity is a disease you wear.”