People with larger bodies often report that when they go to the doctor, their problems are ignored or written off as an inevitable result of their weight. Having a higher body mass index is correlated with heart disease, diabetes, certain types of cancer and other conditions. But this year the American Medical Association adopted a new policy around BMI, acknowledging that it’s an imperfect measure of body fat across populations.
And a growing number of health care providers are going further than that: practicing what they call weight-inclusive, or weight-neutral, medicine, as KUOW’s Eilis O'Neill reports.
For Seattle family medicine physician Dr. Tess Moore, a weight-neutral practice includes having blood pressure cuffs and gowns in a variety of sizes. Moore says she recommends nutrition and diet changes to her patients without the goal of losing weight, pointing to research that shows most people with obesity who lose weight gain it back within a few years. Instead, she chooses to focus on a patient's long-term health and make "recommendations that are much more likely to be sustainable."
Other providers say that encouraging weight loss is appropriate for certain conditions, as long as the topic is approached in a respectful manner.
Learn more about the new approach.
Plus: Could weight-loss drug Ozempic have mental health side effects? | 
