The impact of workplace health promotion programs emphasizing individual responsibility on weight stigma and discrimination

Over time, there has been a steady increase of workplace health promotion programs that aim to promote employees’ health and fitness. Previous research has focused on such program’s effectiveness, cost-savings, and barriers to engaging in workplace health promotion. The present research focuses on a downside of workplace health promotion programs that to date has not been examined before, namely the possibility that they, due to a focus on individual responsibility for one’s health, inadvertently facilitate stigmatization and discrimination of people with overweight in the workplace.