Being overweight isn’t even that bad for you

This is the fat-logic argument I encounter most often, and which I believed (wanted to believe) myself for many years. It is also the one I kick myself about the most, in retrospect. I always claimed to have made a rational decision about my weight (‘I enjoy eating too much and weighing less is just not worth the inevitable restrictions it would involve.’) But I was labouring under two misapprehensions: that it is extremely difficult to achieve and maintain normal weight; and that it doesn’t have all that many advantages anyway. Now, I argue the opposite whenever I can.

I respect anyone’s decision to set other priorities and happily accept being overweight or obese. Just because you can change a situation, it doesn’t mean you must. With that said, I do think it’s important for that decision to be an informed one, rather than one based on self-delusion or distortions of the truth by others. If it isn’t, you run the risk, later in life, of thinking, If I’d properly examined the facts, I would have chosen differently.

It is for this reason that I present, in the chapters that follow, the results of my research into the consequences of obesity. I’ve often received feedback saying that the medical section of my blog is a difficult read, especially the part covering individual medical conditions, and I’m sure this is true. But I have always considered it, and still consider it, important to deal with this rather dry subject in as much detail as possible in order to really drive home the point that this is not about whether your bum looks better as a size 36 or a size 42. Rather, it’s about what goes on inside our bodies, and about how being overweight directly affects our quality of life. For this reason, I recommend that you at least skim through the following sections, because, although you may be thinking Yeah, yeah, I know all that, you might still find something out that you didn’t know before. At least, that was my experience while I was researching this part of the book.