It is time to end the fat-shaming and find solutions

How much sympathy do you have for the obese? Do you see them as gluttons? Indolent? A bit – or a lot – of both?

Why don’t they just eat less and exercise more? Why are they so weak-willed?

Every nation in the western world is getting fatter? If the solution was as simple as diet and exercise why is this happening. Has there really been a global decline in willpower?

Clearly not. Humans have not fundamentally changed. Our society has changed making it on the whole more difficult for individuals to choose to live healthily, to eat well and exercise.

So how as a society do we respond to make it easier to be healthy? And what do we do for those who are already obese?

Our current approach is by and large to tell the obese to just lose weight. Experts are clear this advice just doesn’t work.

But we don’t listen to these experts. Calls for more weight-loss surgery to be funded by the public health system are dismissed by those who say taxpayer money should not be wasted treating a condition that is largely of an individual’s making.

Young Nelson man Keightley Teece, who went public with his battle against obesity and his success at losing weight with the help of surgery, was subjected to such criticism.

Readers demanded to know: ‘‘Why should taxpayers have to front cash on people who utterly lack self-restraint and presence of will . . . there used to be a time when gluttony was seen as a sin’’ and ‘‘Young people need to learn about self control and mental toughness just like my generation had to.’’

New Zealand funds about 400 weight-loss operations a year, at a cost of $20,000 each. The surgery is difficult and life-changing.

It means never having a normal meal again, and a lifetime of vitamin and mineral supplements. It is not a decision to be taken lightly.

Yet Teece bravely signed up for it, and also bravely, spoke about it publicly.

Bariatric surgeon Richard Flint says many of the morbidly obese patients he operates on have lost their own body weight four times over in dieting attempts. They know about dieting.

They also know about mental toughness.

Anti-obesity campaigner Robyn Toomath says discrimination shown towards obese people ‘‘is worse than any racism’’ experienced in New Zealand.

Perversely, it seems our sympathy for the obese is shrinking as fast as our own waistlines are expanding.

Ministry of Health statistics show one in three New Zealand adults are obese and another one in three overweight. Those who are a healthy weight are now in the minority.

So our lack of sympathy may be because we don’t believe we have a problem. One Bupa survey found only one-third of respondents considered themselves overweight while their body mass index (BMI) showed six out of 10 were overweight or obese.

Parents of overweight children are even less likely to recognise the problem. In March, a study by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and UCL Institute of Child Health, found just one in 100 parents of clinically obese children recognised their offspring as fat. So what do we know? We know no one chooses to be obese.

The obese are, firstly, victims of their genes – especially those that control appetite – and secondly of an environment saturated in high-sugar, high-fat foods.

It is time that we responded to this by seeing the obese as victims, by ending the fat-shaming, and by working as a society to find solutions.