93 The Professional Counselor | Volume 13, Issue 2 weight in multicultural courses as a core topic. Weight becomes intersectional among identities, and counselors must train to be sensitive to and inclusive of the topic of weight. Broaching weight may feel uncomfortable but be necessary to strengthen the therapeutic relationship. Second, recognizing that weight bias may impact a client’s willingness to select, follow the counsel of, or trust a counselor reiterates the importance of knowing the factors influencing the counseling relationship. Counselors should acknowledge that stereotypes, discrimination, and oppression influence the counseling relationship (Ratts et al., 2016). Counselors should not ignore weight bias as a possible stereotype and should be comfortable discussing it with their clients. Additionally, the multicultural competencies note that “Counselors know when to initiate discussions with regard to the influences of identity development, power, privilege, and oppression within the counseling relationship” (Ratts et al., 2016, p. 41). As society continues to push the thin ideal while simultaneously pushing body acceptance at any size, these contradictory messages will keep weight bias at the forefront of how others are judged. Until weight bias is erased, counselors must be vigilant in understanding how they show up in the session, what message a client may perceive by their body weight, and how to broach the topic to strengthen the therapeutic alliance. If counselors seek to help reduce weight bias in society, they may benefit from reflecting on their own biases, privileges, and experiences with oppression in this area. They also may consider challenging potential biases through professional development, group or individual counseling supervision, or literature about weight bias in society. Limitations Like all studies, this study contains limitations. One limitation is the subjectivity of weight. Without guidelines for what constitutes overweight and underweight, this study heavily relied on participants’ perceptions of these variables, which may be inconsistent across participants. Not specifying these variables opened interpretation for the overlapping areas of overweight versus obese or underweight versus extremely thin. Participants in each treatment condition may have visualized different hypothetical counselors than peers in the same treatment group. Using images may improve the specificity of the variable in future studies. Additionally, there was no identified gender for the hypothetical counselors in each treatment condition, allowing participants to visualize any gender of counselor they chose. This lack of specificity may have created a moderating variable. Women represent higher numbers in the counseling profession. Women experience more discrimination than men (McHugh & Kasardo, 2012; Roehling et al., 2007), and it is unknown if people who identify as gender non-binary experience more or less weight bias. By not distinguishing the gender of the counselor, our ability to make inferences across genders is limited. Creating a study that specifies multiple genders may yield more representative results. Another limitation is that a non-parametric test (e.g., Welch’s ANOVA) was used instead of parametric tests with more statistical power. The decision to use the non-parametric test was unavoidable because of violating the required assumptions. At the same time, future research may corroborate our findings using a parametric test if data allow. Future research may also replicate this study using multivariate ANOVA (MANOVA), which considers correlations of dependent variables. Lastly, social desirability and self-reporting may have impacted responses. While completing the questionnaire, feelings about weight bias may have occurred outside of participants’ awareness, causing cognitive dissonance. To resolve this dissonance, responses may have overtly favored accepting the overweight counselor or selecting fewer negative answers on the AFA. Participants also reported
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