How important is the weight? A quantitative and qualitative study of Expressen’s and Aftonbladet’s presentation of weight, appearance and health

In media we often see articles about how to lose weight, what we shouldn’t like about our bodies and how to get rid of these so called problems. In this essay we examine how weight is portrayed in Sweden’s two largest evening papers, Expressen and Aftonbladet. The purpose of the essay is to see how Swedish evening papers portray weight in relation to health, appearance, and diet. We have used a quantitative content analysis combined with a qualitative critical discourse analysis to examine this. The two methods combined strengthen the validity and reliability in our results. We examine articles from the newspapers from the years of 1996, 2006 and 2016 to be able to see the differences between these years. Through the quantitative content analysis, we found many interesting patterns. Some of the most important findings are that weight often is portrayed in a way of change and not as something static. A loss of weight is in a majority of the articles described as something positive, whereas to gain weight is described as a problem and something negative. We have also found interesting results about gender. Women take the roll of a private person in a majority of the cases. The role of the expert in the articles have changed from a majority of men to a majority of women. Dieting is portrayed as something typically feminine. In the discourse of weight there seems to be at strong connection between the skinny body, happiness and health whereas the fat body is submissively connected to sickness and ill-health. Our bodies seem to be looked at like a project to be taken care of, in order to fit in to the bodily-norms. If someone fits in to the norm they get values in life in return. Our conclusion is that stereotypical norms of the skinny body and the good in loss of weight is reproduced in Expressen and Aftonbladet, and that this haven’t changed over time. We argue that this can lead to consequences in peoples lifes and a discrimination to certain groups in the society