Obesity has experts and policymakers confused. They sometimes act like it is a disease, no more an individual's fault than coming down with the flu. Sometimes, they behave like it is a symptom of a wider social malaise, but again the sufferer is a victim.
In both, the obese person is the injured party and is disempoweringly passive. This, in itself, brings an array of drawbacks.
For one, it is hard to have faith in your own active role in solving a problem when you are taught to believe you are powerless to prevent it.
However, given the extent of obesity, the assumption of passivity now seems to be the only workable alternative.
As long as very fat people existed in numbers small enough to be marginalised, a 'non-victim' attitude towards them was possible. We lumped them together with other abnormal or irresponsible people and felt they deserved our disdain because they chose to indulge in self-destructive behaviour.
But obesity is now far too prevalent for that. The number of adults who have slipped into an unhealthy imbalance between moving and eating has already reached sociological critical mass. Further proof it has shifted from the individual to the social, and from the abnormal to the normal, took place when children started growing up that way.
This banalisation of obesity is having a deep effect on what can be done about it.
