In the context of an ongoing, highly contentious “war on obesity” (O’Hara and Taylor, 2018), bodies categorized as “too heavy” or “fat” are routinely positioned as targets for “helpful” interventions. Simplistic calls to eat less and move more, incorporating “pedagogies of disgust” (Lupton, 2015) that are amplified by dramatizing and moralizing mass media (Raisborough, 2016), routinely incite populations to get trim and “win the battle of the bulge.” Bodies medically deemed to be overweight or obese (read: most people) are, after all, “known” to be a “big problem” not only for individuals but also health systems and economies that can ill afford to be further burdened. “The end of the obesity epidemic,” as suggested by Gard (2011), has not materialized. Rather, rhetoric about this putative problem has been reinvigorated amid entangled and cascading crises (notably economic and fiscal concerns following the 2008 Great Financial Crisis) and, most recently, the urgency evoked by a “dual COVID-19/obesity crisis frame” (Monaghan et al, 2022). Amid the fear, panic, moralizing action, and intense stigmatization that typically accompany the outbreak of a novel infectious disease (Strong, 1990), populations have been warned that “excess” weight/fatness increases the risks of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19), notably hospitalization and death. It was in this context that the United Kingdom's (now former) Conservative prime minister Boris Johnson reiterated the virtues of weight loss for himself and fellow citizens after contracting COVID-19 and being admitted to intensive care (O’Connell et al, 2021).

As per Johnson's publicly expressed concerns about his physicality and fitness, male bodies and health are thoroughly implicated in a biomedical gaze that would seek to render us all conscientious weight watchers. A central premise of this chapter is that there is a need to reinterpret this gendered “body project” (Shilling, 2012), especially amid pathologizing medicalized calls that seemingly provide an incontestable basis for state-sanctioned interventions. Such a proposition is made in view of numerous problems and questions. For instance, what prejudices are expressed when health promoters repeatedly target “idle fat blokes” and urge them to get off the couch and lose weight (Monaghan, 2008)? What about the ethics of such calls given that most people are unable to lose weight and keep it off (Rothblum, 2018) and suggestions that the “fight against fat” is a form of communicated or “symbolic violence” (Bourdieu, 2001; see also Warin, 2020)?