The body was never the problem: What we get wrong about obesity

For most of her life, Anna believed what she was taught to believe: That her body was a disappointment; that her size reflected a personal failure; that standing beside her sister who was prettier, slimmer, effortlessly admired made her deficiency visible.

In her family, no one needed to say it out loud. The comparison lived in glances, in praise that skipped over Anna, in jokes disguised as concern. Her sister was the one photographed, complimented, presented with pride. Anna learned early that love came more easily to those who were pleasing to look at.

And so, she learned to feel ashamed not just of her body, but of her existence within it.

Anna’s struggle with weight did not begin with food. It began in childhood, in a home where she felt tolerated rather than cherished, measured rather than understood.

She learned that being “less pretty” meant being less worthy of attention. Less protection. Less patience. Food became comfort before she had words for rejection. Eating became a way to soothe feelings she was never invited to express.

Her body adapted. It held what her environment could not.

But adaptation is rarely recognised for what it is. Instead, it is labeled failure.

So, Anna spent years trying to correct herself by dieting, shrinking, apologising for the space she took up and believing that if she could just look more like her sister, she might finally belong.

A moment of clarity

During a moment of deep reflection and not something dramatic or mystical, but quietly internal, Anna found herself unusually clear-headed and emotionally present. There was a sense of calm she hadn’t felt in a long time, as if the constant background tension she carried had softened. Her thoughts slowed, her body felt safer, and emotions she usually kept at bay loosened their grip.

In that stillness, a realisation surfaced – not as a sudden revelation, but as something she already knew and could no longer ignore: Her body was never the problem. It was the record.

She began to recollect images of people she had known. It wasn’t just memories, but illustrations of countless people carrying similar burdens. Different faces, different lives, but the same exhaustion. The same shame. The same belief that something was fundamentally wrong with them.

What connected them was not laziness or lack of discipline, but unresolved pain.

What we get wrong about obesity

Anna had been taught, like so many, that obesity is a moral issue. A failure of self-control. A lack of effort.

But what she saw instead was a pattern: childhood wounds, emotional neglect, chronic comparison and unspoken grief. Food became regulation. Weight became protection. The body responded intelligently to an unsafe emotional world.

What had been called weakness was, in truth, survival.

In families like Anna’s, the damage often began early. Children learn who is valued and who is merely endured. When love is conditional – especially on appearance – the body absorbs the message long before the mind can challenge it.

Being raised in the shadow of a “better” sibling left Anna with a quiet, persistent belief: I am the problem.

That belief shaped how she ate, how she moved, how she spoke, and how she allowed herself to be treated. The weight she carried was not just physical, it was the accumulation of years spent feeling lesser, overlooked and silently ashamed.

The real harm was not her size. The harm was teaching her to hate the body that had helped her endure.

What must change

Anna’s story is not unique. It reflects a broader failure familial, cultural and systemic to understand what bodies are responding to.

If real healing is to happen, the narrative around bodies and weight must fundamentally change. We must stop treating weight as the central problem and begin asking what emotional wounds the body is responding to. This means moving away from constant comparison – between siblings, peers or idealised standards of beauty – and replacing it with compassion that recognises each person’s unique history and nervous system. It also requires abandoning the belief that control, restriction and discipline are the primary paths to health. Instead, care must become the foundation: care that listens to the body rather than punishes it, that prioritises safety over appearance, and that understands healing as a process rooted in emotional repair, not external compliance.

This means families must stop ranking children by appearance and start offering unconditional safety; educators and clinicians must ask what happened before asking what’s wrong; health conversations must include trauma, attachment and emotional history; shame must be recognised as harmful – not motivating. And on an individual level, it begins with one question: What has this body been carrying?

For anyone who grew up feeling less chosen, less admired, or less loved, especially in comparison to someone else, Anna’s story offers a different lens.

The body was never the problem. It was responding to a world that asked too much and gave too little. Understanding that truth is not the end of healing, but it is where healing finally begins.