Abstract
In a 1983 article Susan C. Wooley asked the challenging question, “Should obesity be treated at all?”1 The source of her question was the growing recognition that all treatments for obesity were generally ineffective over the long run and that biological, not behavioral forces were primarily responsible for body weight regulation. She felt that millions of people with mild to moderate obesity were needlessly suffering through depriving dieting experiences with little or no long-term benefit to health and well being. In fact, the dieting experience was probably doing more harm than good through its negative impact on self-esteem, body image, and self-worth. Physicians and other health professionals were cited as contributing to, not alleviating the problem, by feeding the national obsession for thinness.
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© 1993 Springer-Verlag New York Inc.
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Sinaikin, P.M. (1993). The Treatment of Obesity. In: Giannini, A.J., Slaby, A.E. (eds) The Eating Disorders. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-8300-0_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-8300-0_17
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