Fat Roosting

It is sad, that people whose lifestyle and consumption of food is such that they have grown uncommonly overweight, causing stress on the health care system, and condemnation from health authorities because their excessive weight renders them susceptible to serious morbidity. There are so many overweight and obese people in society now that the incidence of diabetes, heart attacks and operations for total joint replacement has rocketed as surgery to replace damaged knees and hips strain the health care system.

It becomes difficult to accommodate people on public transit, airplanes, hospital beds incapable of taking excessive weight, along with diagnostic equipment not designed to take the weight and breadth of excessively large individuals. Fat people simply take up too much of everything. Which is detrimental to their own well-being, and detrimental to the manner in which they are viewed by society at large.

Surgical bookings for weight-reduction operations through stomach-stapling and other similar measures take up needed time and space for other emergency operations. All of which cost the health-care system to attempt to restore people who have over-indulged to a better, more balanced state of health. Resentment begins to evidence itself as increasing reports of ill health due to a growing overweight population surfaces.

And overweight people find themselves the objects of ridicule and contempt. "Of all the things we could be exporting to help people around the world, really negative body image and low self-esteem are not what we hope is going out with public health messaging": Dr. Alexandra Brewis, executive director of the School of Human Evolution social Change, Arizona State University.

But it is inevitable, isn't it? Social perception can turn on a dime. Although in the instance of the global phenomenon of constantly growing overweight and obese adults and children, it has been a long time brewing. The constant messaging about the harmful effects of sedentary lifestyles accompanied by incautious appetites and fat-laden pre-prepared foods with little nutritional value is having its effect.

People are increasingly expressing negative attitudes about those in society whose burgeoning weight and compromised health is now seen to be a growing problem. With a rapid "globalization of fat stigma ... The change has come very, very fast", in places as diverse as Tanzania, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Paraguay, Argentina, New Zealand, Iceland, India, Britain, the United States.

An impetus for focus on healthier living, we dare hope.