Who Are You Calling Fat?: empathy and understanding towards people living with obesity

We shouldn’t under estimate the importance of obesity. We are living through a global pandemic, where obesity is now considered a bigger problem than world hunger and Britain is up there amongst the most seriously affected countries.

I am the Professor of Endocrinology at Oxford, and a member of the Royal College of Physicians. I’m also a member of the Obesity Empowerment Network. Our priorities are to improve services, educate doctors and above all to start thinking seriously about prevention and treatment. It is important we have a national debate about what is causing rising levels of obesity and what we are going to do about it.

It is for this reason that I was pleased to be asked to be involved in the new series for BBC Two, Who Are You Calling Fat?. Love Productions put nine very different people, all living with obesity, in a house in the Oxfordshire countryside for just over a week. There they debated a whole host of issues that affect the lives of people living in bigger bodies.

The series explores a number of crucial medical and policy issues, such as the consequences of poorly managed diabetes, and the UK rates of bariatric surgery, currently amongst some of the lowest in Europe. The contributors discussed the public’s belief that obesity is a drain on the NHS and that children should be encouraged to lose weight.

One interesting part of this television series was the inclusion of a number of people who describe themselves as Body Positive. This is a small but increasingly vocal movement in ‘fat politics’ that is responding to years of stigma and discrimination by standing for the right of people living with obesity to be proud of their weight. It is important that we hear and understand all points of view in this often heated debate.

Above all the series promotes empathy and understanding towards people living with obesity and helps us realise that the cure is not as simple as just eating less and exercising more. Science is now identifying some of the many genes that contribute to weight and obesity. There are genes that cause obesity by affecting appetite and the feeling of fullness and, on the other end of the weight spectrum, there are genes that enhance people’s low weight. We know for example that often low weight and high weight run in families. This itself becomes quite a strong argument for considering obesity as a disease, around 70% of which is caused by genes*. 

I hope that the TV series Who Are You Calling Fat? can contribute to a national debate about how we treat people living with obesity and help us decide our priorities about how we should help them.

Watch Who Are You Calling Fat? on Monday 28 and Tuesday 29 October at 9pm on BBC Two

*Barsh GS, Farooqi IS, O’Rahilly S 2000 Genetics of body-weight regulation. Nature 404:644–651