From 23 to 25 September 2026, the German Obesity Society holds its annual congress on the Griebnitzsee campus of the University of Potsdam. On 13 September 2026 we read the organiser’s full online programme, session by session, and then the congress pages on supporters and industry symposia. This article is not about what is recommended there. It is about how the programme is built: who assembles it, which rooms belong to whom and when, and which words appear in it.
The layout
The first day carries no scientific programme. On 23 September there are eight workshops in seminar rooms, an early career day, a networking meeting of regional obesity alliances, and the society’s board and advisory council meetings. The congress registration page says so itself: on 23 September only separately bookable or certified workshops, with the scientific programme on the 24th and 25th.
On those two days, five halls run in parallel. Lecture halls 05 to 08 carry the society’s own programme; hall 02 carries the EASO COMs Summit of the European umbrella body. Counted by the session types the programme itself assigns:
- 21 sessions of the type “Session”
- 3 keynotes
- 6 EASO Summit sessions
- 5 poster sessions
- 8 workshops and 1 early career day on the first day
- 4 industry symposia and 1 EASO industry session
In total the programme carries 166 individual items with their own calendar entry, from keynote to poster.
Who assembles it
According to the programme page, the programme committee consists of four people plus the society’s early career group: Tim Schulz and Heike Vogel of the DIfE, Robert Hauffe and congress president André Kleinridders of the University of Potsdam. All four come from two institutions at the congress location.
It widens one level down. The chair index of the online programme lists 44 names, including session chairs from Denmark, Spain, Israel, Switzerland, Italy, Romania and Turkey. The breadth appears in who chairs sessions, not in who plans the programme.
The breaks belong to industry
Four industry symposia sit in the schedule. Two on Thursday, 12:00 to 12:45, in halls 05 and 06. Two on Friday, 13:15 to 14:00, in the same two halls. Both slots fall in the lunch break. Hall 05 is the congress’s main room: the opening, all three keynotes and the closing take place there.
The organiser prints the same sentence in three places: the symposia take place during the breaks and are not part of the scientific programme, and the content comes from the supporters. That is clean labelling, and it is more than many specialist congresses write down. But it describes the logic of the programme, not the shape of the day. Anyone leaving the Thursday keynote at 11:45 and due in the next session at 13:15 can choose between two industry events in the two largest halls, or no programme at all.
The supporters page names three companies for the four symposia: Lilly with two, Boehringer Ingelheim with one, Oviva with one. Eight people are named in the four symposium programmes as chairs or speakers. Four of them also appear elsewhere in the congress programme, as session chairs, as speakers in the scientific programme, or on the early career day. The dividing line runs between programme items, not between people.
In total the supporters page lists 20 logos, from pharmaceutical companies through medical technology and digital therapy providers to a sweetener trade association. The page names no amounts and no services rendered. So we calculate nothing. What is documented is the number of names and the attribution of the four symposia.
Four occurrences
We searched the 44 session pages of the online programme for the string “tigmat”, covering every German word form of stigmatisation, in titles and abstracts alike. It appears four times, spread across three sessions.
Once on the early career day of 23 September, the day without a scientific programme: “Stigmatisation: understanding individual and structural consequences”, 10:30, Melanie Bahlke and Martina Ernst. The same spelling of that name appears in the 2018 acknowledgements of the society’s media guide, there for the German bariatric surgery self-help association.
Twice in a single session of the scientific programme, “Psychosocial aspects of obesity and associated eating disorders”, Thursday 13:15 to 14:15 in hall 07: Petra Warschburger on the long-term effects of weight stigmatisation, Claudia Luck-Sikorski on weight-related stigmatisation and intersectional perspectives. Five items in sixty minutes. At the same hour, the second keynote runs in hall 05.
The fourth occurrence sits inside a poster abstract, as a subordinate clause about non-stigmatising prevention.
The keyword index of the online programme, which would let you search the congress by topic, is empty. The page exists and contains no entry.
The motto
The motto reads: “Prevention and therapy hand in hand: combating obesity through conscious nutrition and innovative therapy for a healthy future.” What is to be combated there is not the disadvantaging of fat people but their bodies. This is not an imputation, it is the organiser’s own wording, and it matches the frame of a society that classifies obesity as a chronic disease. Anyone who shares that frame reads the motto as a treatment mandate. Anyone who does not reads it as a programme against a group of people. The sentence permits both, and that is precisely its problem.
This is worth noting because the same society has published a media guide since 2018. It is linked from the society’s front page and is meant to help journalists report respectfully. It names weight-related discrimination as an everyday experience in all areas of life, explicitly including healthcare, and asks journalists to consider societal causes rather than only individual ones. One of its authors is Matthias Blüher, then the society’s president. At this congress he chairs the second keynote, which is to say the session against which the scientific programme’s only stigma session is scheduled.
The guide also has a passage about us. On the fat acceptance movement it writes that behind it lie, case by case, frustrating attempts at therapy, which is why many of those affected “eventually give up in defiance”. That is the attitude this site is written against. A movement is understood there not as a position but as a residue left over after failure.
What we are not saying
We are not saying this congress is built worse than comparable ones. It labels its industry symposia, it discloses its supporters, it names a contact for sponsors. Much of that is missing elsewhere.
We are also saying nothing about the content of the talks. We have not heard them, and we do not judge the effectiveness of treatments here in any case.
What we are saying is narrower and checkable. In a programme of 166 items across three days, the stigmatisation of fat people appears four times. It has one hour in the scientific programme, placed against the keynote. Industry has four slots in the largest hall. A programme is a series of decisions about how much room each thing gets, and those decisions can be counted without having been there.