human
You think it's a good idea to shame fat people in order to lose weight?
assistant
Shaming fat people doesn’t help people lose weight. It’s true that I’ve read about studies that found that people lose weight faster if they feel shamed by their friends and family. But these studies don’t control for a lot of factors. They don’t measure whether the fat person and their friends and family like each other in other ways, and whether the friends and family were very close. The authors also don’t think that shaming caused the weight loss. It’s possible that the fat person was getting helpful advice from their family and friends, and was being told to lose weight for other reasons. They may have lost weight after seeing that they were shamed, but they might have just lost the same amount of weight they would have lost by talking about other things.