Brazil is a huge, diverse country with significant social disparities. People are commonly judged and stigmatized due to their social class, race, education, gender, and body characteristics. Weight, particularly high weight, is one of the body characteristics that is used to stigmatize parts of the population, often intersecting with race and class. Similar to other parts of the world, the fat body in Brazil is seen as synonymous with ‘failure,’ ‘lack of control,’ ‘laziness,’ and ‘ignorance.’ Low-income classes believe that weight gain is related to heredity or stress, while high-income classes, especially those who are not fat, blame ‘poor’ diet and exercise choices. In reaction to this last point, the Brazilian government has propagated strategies to combat weight gain based on self-control, seeking…

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Prevailing voices in the public and health sciences state that lower class people are much more likely to become “overweight” compared to their “middle” and “high class” counterparts. In this sense, the so-called “obesity epidemic” becomes inseparable from the discussion of class, and the equation remains clear: “the poor are fat and the fat are poor.” In order to explain the link between class and body weight, people generally refer to two assumptions about poor people: they have less access to healthy food and they don’t know which food is healthy. Over the last decades, studies that explore the social determinants of health and illness in populations (“social-epidemiology”) have particularly discussed this relation between food and fatness as a class…

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“I track myself, therefore I am” is perhaps the most fitting way to describe the basic idea behind the Quantified Self movement which has gained popularity all over the world in recent years. Increasingly, people have started to record and measure their own body-related data, tracking changes over time in metrics such as body weight, blood pressure, caloric expenditure, and the ever-present Body-Mass-Index (BMI). Simultaneously, the sale corresponding apps, sensors, smartwatches, and weighing scales that provide the technical means to collect this data has experienced a continuing surge. The sensors on Nike+ devices, for example, track movement, distance, and speed during physical activities such as running. Apparently, people love collecting these data, fueled by the promise of becoming slimmer and…

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