Inducing Self-Compassion to Mitigate Internalized Weight Stigma in Sexual and Gender Minority Adolescents: An Intervention Proposal

Higher-weight individuals commonly experience weight-based stigma and discrimination, which contribute to disparate physical and psychological health outcomes via weight bias internalization. The most common form of prejudice-based harassment among youth, weight-based victimization poses a significant threat to healthy psychosocial development. Sexual and gender minority youth may be particularly vulnerable to the harmful effects of weight stigma, given they report disproportionately high rates of weight-based victimization and face adversity at the intersections of multiple oppressed identities. Self-compassion promotes resilience to psychosocial stress, and offers promise as a tool for disrupting the links between weight stigma and worse health by reducing stigma internalization. This paper proposes a novel 8-week self-compassion intervention to reduce internalized weight stigma and body shame in higher-weight, sexual and gender minority youth. Drawing from established compassion interventions applied at a developmentally-appropriate level, the proposed program will target internalized weight stigma by teaching self-soothing strategies and adaptive psychological processing to empowering participants to work through experiences of weight-related shame and self-criticism. Community-centered, group-based delivery will foster identity affirmation and community resiliency to minority stress. Pre/post-intervention measures of internalized weight stigma and body shame will be administered at baseline and at the end of the intervention (8 weeks) to examine efficacy. This intervention is the first empirical attempt to apply self-compassion to alleviate internalized weight stigma in sexual and gender minority youth. If effective, self-compassion could be applied broadly to enhance resiliency and adaptive coping in all groups marginalized by weight stigma