Meet our YWM2021 – VIRTUAL Speakers: Ian Patton, PhD, RKIN, CEP

Hello everyone!

I cannot explain how excited I am to be presenting at this year’s Your Weight Matters conference.  My name is Ian Patton and I am the Director of Advocacy and Public Engagement for Obesity Canada, a national health charity dedicated to improving the lives of individuals living with obesity through research, education and advocacy.  I am also an adjunct faculty member of York University (Toronto) in the School of Kinesiology and a patient advocate. My work is centered around the goal of eliminating weight bias and discrimination and improving access to care for individuals living with obesity.

My academic training includes completing a PhD in Kinesiology where my research focus was on physical activity and obesity. I was trained as a Certified Exercise Physiologist and have worked both in fitness and rehab settings in the past. As a professor, I currently teach courses on human growth and development and the impact of physical activity on that development through the lifespan.

For this year’s YWM2021-VIRTUAL conference, I will be joined by Yelena Kibasova for a presentation titled “Beyond Weight Loss: Exercise for Your Health and Wellbeing”.  As someone who has worked as a Kinesiologist, I am passionate about movement and how important it is for the human body.  I believe strongly that physical activity is the single most impactful thing someone can do for their health and wellbeing. I however, am also someone who has lived with obesity (I had bariatric surgery in 2014) and seen first hand how inaccessible and problematic fitness and exercise can be for many of us. This conflict between my two worlds is something that I am passionate about changing.

Through this session I hope you can begin to view exercise through a slightly different lens and realize that physical activity is for everyone regardless of size, shape or even mobility! I also want you to understand that the benefits of being active go well beyond weight management. If exercise is something you hate, something that causes pain and suffering and makes you feel bad about yourself, you have been doing it wrong.

With these points above in mind, we will challenge you to stop thinking about exercise as part of weight-loss but rather, something much more important.

Living an active life is something you should enjoy, something you should do long term and something you should be proud of.

I invite you to join us and learn more about this topic as well as all of the other amazing sessions that will be part of YWM2021 – VIRTUAL! It is a “can’t miss” event.  See you there!