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Who Are You Calling Fat? review – pride, prejudice and gastric bands

From a body-positive activist to ‘good fatties who work out’, this fascinating reality show brings together nine people to tackle all the biggest questions about their weight

It’s the simplest of formulas – put X number of people united by one common factor and differing in almost all other respects in front of cameras and let what will be be – but when it works, it really works.

In Who Are You Calling Fat? (BBC Two) it is the turn of nine people living with obesity to be brought together under one Oxfordshire roof for a month to examine attitudes to fatness. At one end of the spectrum is gastric-banded 57-year-old Del, who was previously 25st, and had many health issues, together with side-effects from the drug he takes to control them. At the other end of the spectrum is Victoria, a fat-positive advocate and activist who calls bariatric surgery “stomach amputation” and considers “overweight” and “obese” to be offensive terms that carry unnecessary moral implications by suggesting there is a weight you “should” be. The rest fall between them, with civil servant Babs at the most conflicted midpoint: she hates … let’s call it “the amount of adipose tissue she carries” and herself for having accumulated it. But after a life of futile dieting and covering up on the beach, she wishes she could find a way for her size not to matter to her – or at least not to dominate her life.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2PppgkE

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