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By Sharon Kirkey

Doctors are being urged to avoid using “undesirable terms” such as “fatness” or “obesity” when broaching a discussion about excess body fat with their patients.

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“Use of such terms may offend or distress some patients and prevent them from continuing to discuss their weight,” say researchers who surveyed 390 obese patients in the Philadelphia area and asked them to rate words they found the most, and the least offensive for describing their excess size.

Other undesirable descriptors patients offered up included “you are way too fat” and “you are lazy.”

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The words “obese” and “fat” too often carry negative and demeaning connotations, the study’s authors write in the journal, Obesity.

“Very few physicians — sometimes I’ve seen numbers as low as 12 per cent — counsel their obese patients to lose weight,” said lead author Sheri Volger, project manager at the Center for Weight and Eating Disorders at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine.