Women with obesity in Turkiye face physical strain and social stigma

Obesity has long been framed as a matter of individual willpower, a simple equation of calories consumed and calories expended. A new qualitative study from Türkiye challenges that framing at its root, showing how the everyday lives of women living with obesity are shaped not just by biology and metabolism but by gender roles, societal beauty standards, and the social construction of the body itself. The research, published in the journal Current Psychology, draws on in-depth interviews with twenty women to build one of the most detailed phenomenological portraits to date of what it actually feels like to inhabit a body that society constantly scrutinizes, criticizes, and polices.

The study was conducted by Ayşe Nur Boz of the Department of Social Work at KTO Karatay University and Sinan Akçay of Selçuk University, both based in Konya, Türkiye. Taking an explicitly feminist social work perspective, the researchers set out to move beyond the medical model that dominates most obesity research and services. Instead of asking only what obesity does to the body, they asked what living with obesity does to the whole person: her sense of self, her relationships, her place in public space, and her ability to access care. The feminist lens, the authors argue, allows for a holistic understanding of how gender roles, societal beauty standards, and the social construction of the body together shape women’s experiences of obesity in ways that clinical approaches routinely miss.

Methodologically, the study is grounded in feminist phenomenology, a research tradition that privileges the lived, first-person experience of marginalized groups and treats participants as co-creators of knowledge rather than passive subjects. The researchers recruited twenty women aged between 18 and 65, each with a Body Mass Index of 30 or higher, and excluded those who were pregnant to avoid confounding the accounts with pregnancy-related weight changes. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, a format flexible enough to let unexpected themes surface while still covering the domains the researchers wanted to probe: the origins of their weight gain, the texture of daily life with obesity, and any attempts to move away from it. The interviews were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis, following the approach developed by Braun and Clarke, in which the researcher’s own position and assumptions are explicitly acknowledged and interrogated throughout the coding process. The analysis was supported by MAXQDA 2024, a qualitative data analysis software package that helped the team organize, retrieve, and compare coding across all twenty transcripts.

Three overarching themes emerged from the analysis. The first concerns the dynamics related to the development and persistence of obesity. Here the women’s accounts revealed that their weight histories could not be reduced to genetics or poor choices. Participants described psychological burdens, motivational struggles, lifestyle constraints, and social pressures that intertwined with biological factors. Life events, emotional eating, limited access to affordable nutritious food, and the demands of caregiving roles expected of women all appeared as forces that both initiated weight gain and made it stubbornly persistent. The finding echoes a growing body of literature on sex- and gender-related differences in obesity, which shows that the pathophysiology, prevalence, and consequences of obesity differ between women and men, and that gender role attitudes themselves influence obesity risk and the gender gap in weight.

The second theme, being a woman living with obesity, captured the multilayered nature of the experience. The researchers found that women’s experiences spanned biological, psychological, social, spatial, and political dimensions simultaneously. Biologically, women described the physical weariness referenced so poignantly in the study’s title, taken from a participant’s own words: “My body is weary from weight, my mind from criticism.” Psychologically, participants reported shame, anxiety, and internalized weight stigma, which previous research has linked to disordered eating, depression, and avoidance of healthcare. Socially, they described judgment from family members, romantic partners, strangers, and even healthcare professionals, a phenomenon well documented in studies of weight bias and health care utilization. Spatially, women described how public environments, from seating on public transport to clothing shops with limited plus-size ranges, communicated exclusion. Politically, they experienced their bodies as sites of constant negotiation over who gets to define beauty, health, and worth.

The third theme, experiences related to distancing from obesity, explored the women’s attempts to lose weight and what those attempts revealed. Participants’ motivations for weight loss were rarely about health alone; they were entangled with a desire to escape stigma, to reclaim social belonging, and to meet the expectations placed on women’s appearance. The accounts of repeated attempts and relapses align with research on weight cycling, which has been associated with depressive symptoms in large population studies. Crucially, the women did not describe their struggles as failures of willpower but as battles fought against a landscape stacked against them: emotional triggers for eating, environments that discourage physical activity, and a healthcare system in which weight bias can itself become a barrier to receiving appropriate care.

The ethical architecture of the study deserves attention in its own right. Institutional ethical approval was obtained from the Non-Interventional Clinical Research Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Health Sciences at Selçuk University on June 21, 2022, in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. All participants gave detailed informed consent, and in a striking gesture toward participant agency, each woman was offered the chance to choose the pseudonym under which her words would appear in the research. The authors explicitly frame the participants as “the true co-creators of knowledge” in the process, thanking them for their courage, sincerity, and trust. The interview data themselves are not publicly available due to ethical restrictions and the sensitive nature of the narratives, with only anonymized excerpts presented in the manuscript.

The theoretical contribution of the study lies in its insistence that obesity is socially constructed as well as biologically embodied. Philosophers and social scientists have long debated whether obesity should be defined as a disease, and the authors side with perspectives that treat it as a phenomenon partly defined by social norms and values. From a feminist standpoint, the female body under obesity is not merely a medical object; it is a body living under the weight of objectification theory’s predictions, where self-objectification, body shame, and body dissatisfaction form a vicious cycle that affects eating behavior, mental health, and even cognitive performance. The study also draws on the sociocultural mechanism literature showing that gender role attitudes shape obesity prevalence, and on the body politics literature that treats bodies as arenas of political struggle.

For practice, the implications are concrete. The authors argue that empowerment must be addressed at individual, societal, and structural levels concurrently rather than sequentially. At the individual level, this means gender-sensitive counseling that acknowledges the psychological toll of stigma. At the societal level, it means confronting beauty standards and weight stigma in media, retail, and everyday interaction. At the structural level, it means designing obesity-related health and social services that do not themselves reproduce bias. The study advocates a more proactive role for social work in supporting women affected by obesity, positioning social workers as professionals who can bridge clinical treatment and the social realities that shape health behaviors.

The research was derived from the first author’s doctoral dissertation under the supervision of the second author, received no external funding, and declares no conflicts of interest. The authors note that a language model–based AI tool was used to support linguistic clarity and formal editing during manuscript preparation, with additional review by an academician with advanced language proficiency. Published as article number 1482 in Volume 45 of Current Psychology, the study received on June 16, 2026, was accepted on August 27, 2026, and appeared on September 11, 2026.

In an era when anti-obesity medications are grabbing headlines and the global prevalence of obesity continues to climb, this study offers a corrective reminder: for the women who live with it, obesity is experienced not as a number on a chart but as a daily negotiation with bodies that hurt, minds that are tired of criticism, and societies that refuse to make room for them. Listening to those voices, the authors contend, is not an optional supplement to medical treatment. It is the foundation on which any genuinely effective and humane response to obesity must be built.