there are scales of justice, impact and time while mass delivers in its own unique way
It’s one of life’s more complicated challenges as the pressure to meet socially approved ideals and expectations, competes with the more urgent and personal nature of health. So, whether it’s type-2 diabetes, cardiovascular issues or the build up of fat in and around the liver: your overall bodyweight carries familiar implications, throughout most if not all of your life. That’s not news and neither is our prejudice or a less intense bias, shaping the way we see, think and feel about it all. In fact, in the same way that a fear of ageing can influence negative attitudes towards the elderly, our fear of looking let alone being unhealthy seems profound, through an existential lens.
It’s complicated, while many people are content with their health regardless of status, and so if you were to ask: what does food mean or represent to you, the answers are as wide as they are deep. In most cultures around the world, for instance, food is often central to the bonding within families and by extension: a national identity, too. So, as a source of pride, it’s a reminder to the world that what we eat is special while reinforcing a relationship with ourselves, first and foremost, that frames our physical and mental wellbeing. This means, as the years pass and we maintain patterns formed in our youth, questioning who we are by way of our eating habits becomes harder.
‘On days my parents celebrated an incoming check, we had some great meals, and I would typically overeat and feel sick later. As a teenager, I spent countless hours trying to work off such tendencies, trying to ourun the calories. Even later, despite the fact that I had courses in college on nutrition and a pretty intense workout regime, these old habits remained.’
Rodney Luster, Ph.D, Psychology Today Magazine
For some of us, excess weight in the form of obesity is classified as a medical condition where genetics and the environment play crucial roles, while influencing our metabolic and psychological processes. So, outdated ideas of greed or a lack of self-control appear to be just that when it comes to prevailing explanations, and whilst we look towards nuanced conversations around the topic: dissenting or investigatory opinions are never far away.
‘As there is no universally accepted definition of a disease, it is possible that one cannot have a scientific, definitive answer regarding obesity. The American Obesity Society suggested that since there is no clear definition of a disease, it does not make sense to ask if obesity is a disease. They do support calling obesity a disease based on a utilitarian approach to public health.’
Howard Rosen, ‘Is Obesity a Disease or a Behaviour Abnormality?’
Essentially, this utility of thought means trying to provide the greatest benefit for the largest number of people which, in turn, raises questions about the environments we live in and how conducive they are to healthy choices. So, of course, where you live determines a great deal from how well you sleep at night to your vulnerability to crime. Equally, your exposure to fast food, cheap alcohol and the relentless tide of sugary advertising pulls you in various directions, as the availability of so much temptation puts pressure on your waistband as well as a health service.
Naturally, the advertisers know what they’re doing and an appeal to the dopamine in your brain can prove overwhelming: which in itself, acts like a brake on the ‘feel-good factor’ as the more you consume, the less receptive is your wiring to the dopamine effect. Obviously, this pushes you to crave and eat further in order to get the same ‘hit’ and before you know it: the excess sugar or glucose in your bloodstream that isn’t regulated by insulin for energy, is turned into glycogen for storage in the liver and muscles. When that finally reaches its maximum, the rest is modified into triglycerides for storage in fat cells.
Ultimately, it’s open season as a long-running debate exists about dopamine’s function in your brain’s reward-processing system. For some, the neurotransmitter and hormone is a precurser to ‘liking’ someone or something while for others it enables the ‘learning’ process by raising or lowering in volume, according to success or failure. A third set views it as a product of the psychological cues related to ‘wanting’, so the issue is as complicated as it is interesting.
Meanwhile and as we all know, other factors in the story of weight gain and loss include eating disorders and where what you see when you look into a mirror bears little resemblance, to the real you. It’s a major challenge for all concerned and across demographics, and in 2018, clinical commissioning groups in the UK spent around £51-million in support of children and young people’s eating disorders. A common misconception over time, though, has been to see these afflictions as a female problem alone when, in fact, both sexes are vulnerable. In 2021, for instance, and across the world and regardless of population size: the ratio was often double or tripling towards women, whether in Poland or Algeria or Chile and Japan. Equally, the UK population grew from 57.67 million, in 1990, to 67.67 million, in 2021, while the ratio changed from a third to just under a half. So, why does it lean more in the direction of girls and women?
‘There [are] also external factors that can affect body image, including what you see in the media and reflected around you. When you start to feel bad about yourself, it can be easy to feel bad about your body, compare what you look like to theirs, or hold yourself to unrealistic standards.’
‘Pressure on body image can be exacerbated by the online world and social media. An NHS [UK, National Health Service] report last year showed that girls who said they compared themselves to others on social media were more likely to have a mental-health condition than those who didn’t – and this is likely to be related, at least in part, to body image.’
Deidre Kehoe, ‘Social media only exacerbates pressure on body image – it’s time to take a break.’
Clearly, it’s a different and delicate narrative to consciously shedding pounds and in my own recent experience of dropping from 14st, 9lbs or 95kg to 12st, 7lbs or 81kg, in three-and-a half months, it taught me a lot about the psychology of losing weight: where I’d never had to do it before. My incentive? Stepping on to the electronic scales and seeing my body fat percentage at 26.9%, as a 54-year-old man. With it being a mere blink from crossing over into obesity by some measures, I didn’t know that the visceral and ectopic fat in my abdomen was set to test me, in a whole new way.
It was certainly visceral in more ways than one and of greater concern was the diagnosis of Non-alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease, a few years ago, and which I’d been told to manage through exercise, diet, low stress and early nights. Thankfully, it’s reversible up to a point, and these days it’s called Metabolic Dysfunction-associated Steatotic Liver Disease, MASLD, and it’s a growing problem impacting some 30% of the global population while affecting lean individuals, as much as anyone else.
So, on the 1st April, I began a health kick that included callisthenics, kilometres on a static bike, mobility and stretching work as well as changes to my diet and self-monitoring, through daily updates in a health journal. Those entries recorded exercise type; meal plans; statistics; old injuries and general notes and remain invaluable because they established a sense of responsibility. Yet, while I’ve never had an issue with motivation: a lack of desire to update it on a given day, acted like the proverbial canary in a coal mine. Why? Because one day often leads to two or more and so begins the creeping apathy, that soon turns into skipped exercises.
As a result, twelve weeks later and with multiple reps, miles and culinary purity; I stepped on to the scales to see my body fat at 20.8%, with a remaining target of 17%. As a lifelong non-drinker or smoker, I felt even better in various ways, too, which simply highlights the importance of liver health and its many functions. Yet, a lot of this was possible because I’ve spent a lifetime keeping fit which in itself has been critical in seeing me through some challenging health problems, like chronic carbon-monoxide poisoning. So, having been physically active from the age of six and then diving into weight training at the age of fourteen to do something about a ridiculously skinny frame: I also cycled five miles to school and back each day, for a couple of years.
This shows how your body’s health memory can help you, meaning, in the end, the last few months came down to a personal driver, and a general template for this lies in something called Self-Determination Theory or SDT. It describes the way in which human growth and development evolves through the prism of motivation and the social contexts, that help or hinder your progress. So, with our psychological dependency on choices, personal ability, feedback, success and relationships, we build on these things to form a confidence that inspires us to keep going in the face of a task or challenge.
Another way of seeing it, is to talk about ‘agent causation’ or where a person initiates a chain of events, independently of others. Naturally, the desire to produce, distribute and consume resources fuels an evolutionary success that feeds into itself. Meanwhile, on the other side of that coin sits ‘event causation’ which is conceptually linked to physical cause and effect, as the name suggests. Both, fall into the idea of ‘Action Theory’; the area of philosophy dealing with knowledge and actions that are causally linked or not, to greater or lesser degrees.
Losing weight and particularly from the abdomen will always be amongst the most difficult of endeavours and one that many of us take for granted, through genes, environment and or lifestyle. In turn, that doesn’t allow us to pass judgement on those struggling with a reading on their scales when there are chronic conditions affecting weight, just as the infrastructure around us actively promotes weight gain whilst supporting us to lose it, at the same time. Of course it does because contradiction is the human condition, making the first line of defence: a series of questions. What do you believe about yourself? What does your self-talk sound like? What are your historical coping strategies? Are you eating for compensation, boredom, sadness, activity association or justifying it with something else?
- ‘In 2022, 1 in 8 people in the world were living with obesity.
- Worldwide adult obesity has more than doubled since 1990, and adolescent obesity had quadrupled.
- In 2022, 2.5 billion adults (18 years and older) were overweight. Of these, 890 million were living with obesity.
- In 2022, 43% of adults aged 18 years and older were overweight and 16% were living with obesity.
- In 2024, 35 million children under the age of 5 were overweight.
- Over 390 million children and adolescents aged 5-19 years were overweight in 2022, including 160 million who were living with obesity.
World Health Organisation, Obesity and Overweight, 2025
Depending on your circumstances, your relationship with food, weight and dieting can change in accordance with timescales, meaning: whatever you tell yourself, well and truly matters.
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Fitness Class, by Rui Dias, Pexels – Main Image
Meal Time, by Cottonbro Studios, Pexels
Measured Silence, by Shvets Production, Pexels
Callisthenics, by 823sl, Pexels
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