Weight Stigma Awareness Week 2026 takes place on 8 and 9 September. That sentence is on the front page of the organisers’ own website, and it is the only date on that website that refers to 2026. Four other places on the same site give three other answers.
This is not a complaint about a small organisation’s web maintenance. It is the practical problem anyone has who wants to attend: you search for the date, you land on the official page, and the page contradicts itself before you have scrolled to the bottom. So this piece does two things. It writes down what the week actually is, session by session, and it writes down where the site says something else, so you can tell which line to trust.
Everything below was read at the primary source on 1 September 2026. No aggregators, no press releases.
What is confirmed
The front page of weightstigmaawarenessweek.org states: “This year’s event will be September 8-9, 2026!” The same page names the two organisations behind the week, The Body Equity Alliance and Within Health, and names Sharon Maxwell as the 2026 keynote.
The agenda page carries the heading “Calendar of Events 2026” and lists this programme. All times are given in EST on the page itself.
Tuesday, 8 September
- Sharon Maxwell, 10:00 to 11:30, marked as a CE session
- Dr. Wendy Oliver-Pyatt, 12:00 to 13:30, marked as a CE session
- Panel with the WSAW co-creators, 13:15 to 14:00, described only as “Coming soon”
Wednesday, 9 September
- Dr. Monica Peralta, 10:00 to 11:30
- Carianne D’Oriano, 12:00 to 13:30
- Sophia Apostol, 14:00 to 15:30, a ninety-minute writing workshop on fat joy
Two CE session titles appear in this block: “Reclaiming Fat Power in Healthcare: From Patient to Epistemic Authority” and “Healing Intergenerational Body Shame: Breaking the Cycle of Weight Stigma Across the Life Span.” The page’s layout places both titles between the speaker names rather than under one of them, so which title belongs to which speaker cannot be read off the page. We are not guessing.
Thursday, 10 September
- “Ask The Alliance: Weight Stigma Awareness Week”, 20:00 to 21:00 EST, announced as a live-streamed conversation with a separate Zoom registration, and stated to be recorded
Registration for the main programme runs through a page at ce-go.com, the continuing-education platform Within Health uses. The site’s register buttons all point at the 2026 address there.
Where the site says something else
Four contradictions, each on a page the organisers control.
The agenda is three days long, the front page says two. The front page announces 8 and 9 September. The agenda page adds Thursday 10 September with the “Ask The Alliance” session under the same 2026 heading. Both statements are current. Neither corrects the other.
The FAQ still describes a different month. Under “When does Weight Stigma Awareness Week take place?”, the front page answers: “Weight Stigma Awareness Week typically occurs during the last week of September, and the exact dates for the current year are September 23-27, 2024.” That is on the same page, roughly a screen and a half below the September 8-9 announcement. The reader who scrolls gets 2024. The reader who does not gets 2026.
A registration page linked from the front page shows the 2024 event. The front page invites readers to “ten live virtual educational events” and links that phrase to the older ce-go address without the year in it. That page opens with “Date: September 24 – 25, 2024” and a speaker list from that year. The “ten live virtual educational events” and the “up to five CEUs” that go with the phrase describe a programme roughly twice the size of the one on the 2026 agenda, which has six sessions plus a panel marked as not yet announced.
Two sessions on 8 September overlap. Oliver-Pyatt’s session runs 12:00 to 13:30, the co-creators’ panel starts at 13:15. Fifteen minutes are booked twice.
None of this makes the week itself less real. It does mean the front-page date line and the agenda page are the two lines worth trusting, and everything below the fold on the front page is left over from earlier years.
The theme, and where it does and does not appear
A press release distributed in August announced a 2026 theme for the week, “The Power of Fat Joy”. Checked again on 4 September: the phrase still does not appear on weightstigmaawarenessweek.org as a theme. What appears there is one workshop, Sophia Apostol’s ninety-minute writing session on 9 September, described on the agenda as focused on fat joy.
The theme does appear on one organiser’s own page. The registration site for the event, run by co-host Within Health on its continuing-education platform (within-health.ce-go.com), states that this year’s theme is “The Power of Fat Joy” and lists the same two dates and the same speakers. So the theme is published by one of the two organisers, on the page where professionals register for credit, and not on the week’s own site. We report both facts as they stand.
Update, 4 September 2026: an earlier version of this section said the theme appeared on no organiser page. The registration page was found on 4 September and this section was rewritten accordingly.
Who runs it
Two organisations, and they are not the same kind of thing.
The Body Equity Alliance is an advocacy organisation. Its chief executive, Chevese Turner, is named on the WSAW site as co-creator and co-host of the week.
Within Health is a commercial provider of eating disorder treatment. Its own site describes what it sells in plain terms: personalised eating disorder treatment for adolescents and adults, delivered as multidisciplinary clinical care. Its co-founder Dr. Wendy Oliver-Pyatt is the other co-creator and host, and speaks on 8 September. The continuing-education platform that handles registration is Within Health’s.
That combination is worth stating out loud, without insinuation. An awareness week about weight stigma is co-hosted by a company that treats eating disorders for money, and the free continuing-education credits attached to it are credits practitioners collect on that company’s platform. Everything on the agenda may be worth attending on its merits. Readers are still entitled to know who is paying for the room.
What this means if you want to take part
Attendance is free and online. The sessions are recorded, and the agenda page says so for the Thursday event explicitly. If you cannot make the live times, which are all US Eastern and therefore run from mid-afternoon into the evening in Europe, the recordings are the point of registering anyway.
If you are a practitioner, the CE sessions are the part that carries credit. If you are not, the writing workshop on 9 September and the Thursday conversation are the two sessions built for people who are not clinicians.
And if you find a date on a third-party site that says late September, it is the 2024 date. It is still circulating because the organisers’ own FAQ is still repeating it.
Related
If you are new to the calendar of this movement, our explainer on Fat Liberation Month covers the other fixed date in the year, its origins, and how people take part.
Sources, all read on 1 September 2026
- Weight Stigma Awareness Week, front page: https://weightstigmaawarenessweek.org/ (date, organisers, keynote, FAQ, links)
- Weight Stigma Awareness Week, agenda: https://weightstigmaawarenessweek.org/attend (2026 calendar of events, session times, Thursday session)
- Within Health continuing-education page for the earlier event: https://within-health.ce-go.com/weight-stigma-awareness-week (2024 date and speaker list)
- Within Health, description of its services: https://withinhealth.com/
Fatosphere reports on organisations and events. We do not recommend treatment, and nothing here is an endorsement of any provider named.