Written by Tara Coltman-Patel, Carly Bray, Paul Baker and Monika Bednarek

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Note: This post was simultaneously published by the Sydney Corpus Lab and by the Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science. It is published under a Creative Commons — Attribution Noncommercial license. If you want to republish it, please follow the relevant licensing guidelines.

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Since 2019, the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (Lancaster University) and the Sydney Corpus Lab (University of Sydney) have collaborated on using corpus linguistics to investigate media representations of obesity in Australia (e.g. Bednarek et al 2024). Most recently, we have started comparing British newspapers with Australian ones (Collins et al 2024; Bednarek et al in press) to identify similarities and differences between English-language news from different newspaper landscapes and different cultural/national contexts. In this blog post, we discuss a recent comparative analysis which focussed specifically on comparing constructions of weight loss. Not only is weight loss discourse a relatively under-researched phenomenon (but see Coltman-Patel and Wright 2023; Coltman-Patel 2023), weight loss discourse was also identified as a topic discussed frequently in both countries’ newspapers (Collins et al 2024).

For this international comparison, we analysed two existing corpora: the UK Obesity News Corpus (henceforth: the UK Corpus) and the Australian Obesity Corpus (henceforth: the Australian Corpus). Both corpora include tabloid/broadsheet[i] newspaper articles from major national newspapers in each country, with articles included in each corpus if they contained at least one mention of obese or obesity. Further detail about each corpus is presented in Brookes & Baker (2021) and Vanichkina & Bednarek (2022). For our comparison here, we concentrated on the articles published in the years in which both corpora overlap, i.e. 2008-2017 (UK Corpus size according to CQPweb: 36,053,221 tokens; Australian Corpus size: 16,355,358 tokens).

Our first comparison investigated the frequency with which the targeted search expressions weight los* and los* weight occur.[ii] Table 1 suggests that weight loss is referenced more frequently in the British than in the Australian corpus. Differences between weight los* occurrences in UK vs Australia are statistically significant with a Log-likelihood score of 16.97 and a p-value of 0.00003806001.[iii] This means that weight los* occurs more frequently in UK newspapers. Differences between los* weight occurrences in UK vs Australia are also statistically significant with a Log-likelihood score of 19.66 and a p-value of 0.0000092602. The retrieved instances of both search expressions also occur in a slightly higher percentage of texts in the UK corpus.

Next, we analysed the words that co-occur five words to the left and right of each search term, i.e. their collocates (retrieved through the MI3 collocation measure). This collocation analysis identified 383 unique words within the top 200 collocates for weight los* and los* weight in each corpus. We consulted concordances for these collocates and classified them into the categories shown in Table 2, which also summarises the frequency of all collocates in each category. The Log Ratio values (Hardie 2014) are included here, because they show that the frequency differences are very small.[iv] In fact, most of the log ratios are around 0, indicating that the category has the same relative frequency in both corpora. The highest log ratio value is 1 for the category of ‘support’, indicating that this category is twice as common in the UK corpus than in the Australian corpus, but this category has very low raw frequencies (248 and 36 instances). While weight loss may thus be mentioned more often in the UK corpus, the words that co-occur with weight loss are very similar in frequency in both corpora, and the same categories occur.

For a full understanding of the discourses that are constructed around weight loss through these collocate categories, we would have to examine each category in detail. However, this is beyond the scope of this blog post. Since weight loss is about humans, we thus decided to have a closer look at only two categories: ‘Personal pronoun’ and ‘People’. We analysed relevant concordance lines containing the terms weight los* and los* weight, alongside the collocates in these two categories, investigating patterns of usage within random samples of one hundred lines respectively for the top three collocates.

Table 3 shows the frequencies of co-occurring personal pronouns (subject and possessive forms, excluding it/its), with an asterisk indicating that the relevant pronoun occurs within the top 200 collocates. N/A means that the relevant pronoun was not identified as a collocate, even when we examined all collocates that were retrieved (i.e., going beyond the top 200). The first number (before the slash) is the raw frequency, while the second number is the normalised frequency (per million words).

As Table 3 demonstrates, the UK Corpus appears to have a substantial focus on female weight loss, with the pronouns her and she being those most frequently used with the term weight los*. In contrast, the pronouns you, your and their are the three most frequent pronouns with this term in the Australian Corpus, and the normalised frequencies for her and she as collocate are much lower in the Australian dataset. Indeed, when a closer look was taken into the use of her and she in the UK Corpus, it was confirmed that female weight loss was a frequent topic of conversation in UK news articles. Female celebrities were frequently discussed and their weight loss celebrated, for example,

• ‘Rosie O’Donnell shows off staggering 53lbs weight loss as she returns to The View (The Daily Mail, September 2014).

In addition, their methods of weight loss were often shared with the audience:

• ‘Adele recently credited her weight loss to simply cutting out sugar from her cups of tea’ (The Independent, December 2015).

Female members of the general public were also featured and celebrated for their weight loss:

• ‘Stacey was so inspired by her weight loss that she quit her job as a sales manager and became a personal trainer’ (The Sun, October 2014).

Characterisations of female weight loss often featured positive evaluative qualifiers such as amazing or inspiring, another one of our collocation categories (see Table 2).

• ‘following her amazing weight loss’ (Daily Mail, January 2014)
• ‘her inspiring weight loss’ (Daily Mail, September 2016)
• ‘her astonishing weight loss’ (The Mirror, November 2017)
• ‘her impressive weight loss’ (The Express, September 2016)

As demonstrated by these examples, the evaluative qualifiers contribute to a positive discourse around female weight loss, depicting it as a worthwhile and inspirational act.

Interestingly, the use of gendered collocate pairs differs considerably across the British newspapers. Over half of all uses of her + weight los* were found in The Daily Mail (n=834, 63.7%), followed by The Mirror (n= 211, 16.1%) and The Daily Express (n= 164, 12.5%). The same pattern was found with she + weight los*, with the majority of occurrences from The Daily Mail (n= 383, 65.1%), followed by The Mirror (n= 94, 16%), then The Daily Express (n= 61, 10.4%). These results indicate that personal/celebrity weight loss stories, specifically, female personal/celebrity weight loss stories are more typically found in British tabloid newspapers, which aligns with previous research (Coltman-Patel and Wright 2023). This association with tabloids may also explain why she and her are found within the top 200 collocates in the British corpus, but not in the Australian corpus, since there are well-known differences between British and Australian tabloids (see e.g. Gaber & Tiffen 2018).

Looking now at the first person, the pronoun I, when collocating with los* weight, is predominantly used in personal stories, in both corpora – for example:

• ‘If I didn’t lose weight, I was going to die. I was a ticking time bomb’ (The Mirror, February 2015)
• ‘my confidence changed when I lost weight’ (The Daily Mail, January 2015).
• ‘If I hadn’t lost weight I wouldn’t be here today’ (The Herald Sun, October 2010).

Whilst this collocate pair is largely used in the same way in British and Australian articles, the British articles are predominantly published in tabloid newspapers, whereas the Australian articles are an even mixture of tabloid and broadsheet newspapers. This might indicate that personal weight loss stories are not typical of tabloid newspapers in Australia as they appear to be in the UK, again, perhaps reflecting the above-mentioned differences between British and Australian tabloids.

In contrast, the pronouns they, their, your and you are used in a more generic fashion and do not reference specific individuals in personal stories. For example:

• ‘We can now tell people that if they lose weight they will get better’ (The Daily Telegraph, December 2015).
• ‘Strict diets can be a good way for people to kick-start their weight loss’ (The Advertiser, February 2013).
• ‘Maintaining the motivation is a key to achieving your weight loss goals’ (Herald Sun, November 2010).

The collocate you is interesting, as it is used in both corpora to issue instructions or to provide tips for weight loss, as in the examples below:

• ‘When you are calculating your recommended caloric intake for weight loss, you need to factor in your age, physical activity, height and weight.’ (The Independent, May 2016)
• ‘while diet is far more important for weight loss, you should exercise too’ (The Guardian, March 2016).
• ‘Blueberries could help you lose weight’ (The Express, July 2016).
• ‘Adding chilli to food really CAN help you lose weight’ (Daily Mail, August 2015).
• Drinking tea could help you lose weight’ (The Telegraph, March 2011).
• ‘In order to lose weight you must give yourself one treat day a week’ (The Express, January 2010).
• ‘This could be the simplest weight loss tip you’ll hear : Eat more fibrous foods’ (The Advertiser, March 2015)
• ‘If you‘re wanting to lose weight and get fitter faster, get yourself some weights’ (The Western Australian, July 2009).
• ‘if you want to lose weight you need to reconnect with what you’re eating’ (The Canberra Times, August 2011).

Such collocate pairs may be accompanied by deontic modal verbs (in both corpora), for example, you need, you should, you must in the examples above, allowing us to see how the collocation categories intermingle. As Table 2 above shows, there is no large difference between how frequently modal verbs collocate with weight los* or los* weight in the British and Australian data. Our examples here suggest that one possible use of such verbs in both corpora is to give advice/instructions, but further analysis of modality would be useful. The above examples also show that, alongside modal verbs, imperatives are used for advice/instructions.

Moving on to the ‘people’ category, the most frequent collocates in this category in both corpora are patients and people (see Table 4).

Understandably, given the medical connotations of the word patients, much of its use when collocating with weight los* is in relation to weight loss surgery, constructing medical discourses around weight loss:

• ‘The NHS forked out 54 million on obese patients’ weight loss surgery in just two years, figures show’ (The Sun, October 2014).
• ‘Patients undergoing permanent weight loss surgery, such as gastric bypass surgery, generally lose about 34 percent of their total weight after one year’ (The Daily Mail, June 2016).
• ‘About 99 per cent of patients lose weight with a sleeve gastrectomy’ (The Advertiser, May 2013).

This medical discourse around weight loss is also apparent in the ‘medical’ collocate category in Table 2 above. In addition, the desire (WANT) and necessity (NEED) of weight loss is referenced when both people and patient collocate with weight los* and los* weight:

• ‘People who want to lose weight need to manage their insulin levels rather than merely restrict certain foods’ (Courier Mail, May 2016).
• ‘Primary health practices could offer a stronger platform to support patients needing to lose weight’ (The Australian, October 2013).
• ‘Nice’s guidance also recommends that these very low-calorie diets, where people eat fewer than 800 calories a day, should not be routinely used and recommended only for people who urgently need to lose weight’ (The Guardian, July 2014).
• ‘About a third of GPs said that they had caused upset when they gave well-meaning or critical advice to patients who needed to lose weight’ (The Times, February 2017).

Weight loss is presented as something individuals need, want and undertake, constructing discourses of personal responsibility. Additionally, when people/patients collocate with los* weight and weight los* in both corpora, they appear in structures discussing strategies of weight loss, both successful and unsuccessful. This is reminiscent of the weight loss tips above.

• ‘Taking vitamin D supplements has been found to aid weight loss in obese people’ (The Independent, May 2015).
• ‘the drug Lorcaserin, marketed as Lorqess in Britain is prescribed to help patients to lose weight by suppressing appetite’ (The Express, July 2017).
• ‘Vegetables not created equal for weight loss. People watching their weight should not treat all vegetables as equals and should limit some types’ (Courier Mail, September 2015).
• ‘Overweight people with type-2 diabetes will lose weight faster on a diet low in fat and carbohydrates but higher in protein’ (The Advertiser, March 2012).

It is also worth noting that the sharper focus on female weight loss discussed in the ‘personal pronoun’ category, is also present within the ‘people’ category. After the collocates patients and people, some of the next most frequent collocates in the UK corpus are woman and women.

As demonstrated by Table 5, woman in particular is more characteristic of the UK corpus – two examples are below:

• ‘A woman is flaunting her weight loss by hanging her smaller-size knickers on her washing line after decades of hiding them from the neighbours’ (Daily Mail, November 2016)
• ‘An obese woman who claims her dramatic weight loss and boob job made her husband ‘jealous’ has filed for divorce and bagged a younger man to go with her new slim figure’ (Daily Mail, January 2016)

Women on the other hand, collocates with los* weight and weight los* in both corpora. It is worth noting hat the nouns man and men do not appear as a top 200 collocate with los* weight or weight los* in either corpus,[v] indicating that both corpora focus on female weight loss to a greater extent than male weight loss. Again, within the UK, the focus of female weight loss is predominantly restricted to tabloid news, whereas, in the Australian corpus, both tabloid and broadsheet newspapers discuss it.

In sum, while our comparison here has only scratched the surface, it has drawn out some of the common discourses around weight loss that occur in both British and Australian newspapers. First, we have identified that the discourse is gendered, with a focus on female weight loss. This association between weight loss and women is not a new phenomenon and is linked to the centuries-long entrenched societal expectations of what constitutes female beauty, a factor of which is thinness (Gill 2009). It also aligns with previous research regarding news in the UK (e.g. Coltman-Patel and Wright 2023; Brookes & Baker, 2021: 180; Coltman-Patel, 2020: 213-214) and Australia (e.g. Grant et al. 2022; Bednarek et al. in press).

Second, we have found that weight loss is medicalised and projected as an act of personal responsibility. This accords with the larger societal discourse surrounding weight loss, which expresses approval and adulations towards those in pursuit of weight loss.

Third, we have identified a strong promotion of weight loss, which is achieved through different linguistic constructions such as positive evaluative qualifiers, deontic modal verbs, and imperatives. The overall sentiment is that weight loss is a necessity which yields positive social and medical outcomes. This sentiment can be perceived as one-dimensional because weight loss is nuanced, and rapid weight loss, which is cyclical in nature (meaning one loses and then gains weight regularly), has a negative effect on health (Thompson & Mctiernan 2011). We observed an occasional acknowledgment of this fact, but most commonly, only the positive short-term outcomes of weight loss were discussed and further, promoted. 

Finally, the differences between the two corpora appear to be slight, and broadly speaking they both contribute towards similar discourses. Clearly, we have only touched upon some of the discourses around weight loss, and hope to encourage further international comparisons of how newspapers construct weight loss.

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References

• Bednarek, M., C. Bray, T. Coltman-Patel, & C. Bonfiglioli (in press). Examining the uptake of media guidelines: A corpus analysis of obesity representation in Australian and UK news. In: G. Brookes, N. Curry, & R. Love (eds) Applications of Corpus Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Bednarek, M., C. Bray, D. P. Vanichkina, G. Brookes, C. Bonfiglioli, T. Coltman-Patel, K. Lee, & P. Baker (2024). Weight stigma: Towards a language-informed analytical framework. Applied Linguistics, 45 (3): 424-448. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amad033
• Brookes, G. & P. Baker (2021). Obesity in the News: Language and Representation in the Press. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
• Collins, L., P. Baker, & G. Brookes (2024). Representations of obesity in Australian and UK news coverage: A diachronic comparison. Applied Corpus Linguistics, 4 (2). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acorp.2024.100092
• Coltman-Patel, T. (2020). Weight Stigma in Britain: The Linguistic Representation of Obesity in Newspapers. PhD thesis, Nottingham Trent University. Retrieved on 18 March 2022 from https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/42065/.
• Coltman-Patel, T. (2023). (Mis)Representing Weight and Obesity in the British Press. Fear, Divisiveness, Shame and Stigma. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 
• Coltman-Patel, T. & D. Wright (2023). Sexualising public health in British tabloids: Celebrities ‘flaunting’ weight loss during a pandemic. Journal of Language and Discrimination, 7 (1): 1-25. 
• Gaber, I., & R. Tiffen (2018). Politics and the media in Australia and the United Kingdom: Parallels and contrasts. Media International Australia, 167 (1): 27-40.
• Gill, R. (2009). Supersexualize me! Advertising and the mid-riffs. In: F. Attwood (ed.) The Sexualization of Western Culture: Mainstreaming Sex (pp. 93-111). London: I.B. Tauris. 
• Grant, S., A. Soltani Panah, & A. McCosker (2022). Weight-biased language across 30 years of Australian news reporting on obesity: Associations with public health policy. Obesities, 2: 103-114. https://doi.org/10.3390/obesities2010010
• Hardie, A. (2014). Log Ratio – An Informal Introduction. Available at: https://cass.lancs.ac.uk/log-ratio-an-informal-introduction/ (Last accessed 1/8/22)
• Thompson, H. J. & A. McTiernan (2011). Weight cycling and cancer: Weighing the evidence of intermittent caloric restriction and cancer risk. Cancer Prevention Research, 4 (11): 1736-1742. 
• Vanichkina, D., & Bednarek, M. (2022). Australian Obesity Corpus Manual. Available at: https://osf.io/c2z5m/  (Last accessed 3/3/22)

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[i] By which we refer to ‘popular’ vs ‘quality’ newspapers, rather than the format.

[ii] The asterisk is a wildcard and stands for zero or more characters; e.g., the search for los* weight will retrieve instances of lose/loses/losing/lost weight.

[iii] The UCREL significance calculator (http://corpora.lancs.ac.uk/sigtest/#guidance) was used to obtain these numbers.

[iv] A positive number indicates that the frequency is higher in the UK corpus, whereas a negative number indicates that the Australia corpus has the higher frequency.

[v] Los*weight AUS: man 14, men 22; weight los* AUS: man 1, men 19; los* weight UK: man 39, men 101; weight los* UK: man 87, men 60.