A number of Irish people have been selected as role models for a European campaign that aims to help fight the stigma and change people’s attitudes about obesity.
The European Coalition for People living with Obesity (ECPO), has created a new European image bank containing professional photographs that can be used by media outlets in place of stigmatizing images that can often be featured instead.
Members of the Irish Coalition for People Living with Obesity (ICPO) have been chosen to feature in the campaign and their images available from the image bank.
“Unfortunately, many images that appear in newspapers perpetuate stereotyped portrayals of people living with obesity and reinforce the social acceptability of weight bias,” said Susie Birney, Executive Director of ICPO.
“They fuel the belief that people with obesity have a lifestyle disorder and are lazy, non-compliant, gluttonous, or have no willpower, despite obesity being recognised as a disease by the World Health Organisation.”
ICPO Members Ben Whelan, Yvonne Byrne and Deirdre Murphy are among 16 of the new image bank models involved.
