Abstract:
In contemporary Western discourse, good health is the moral duty of the individual. Seeing how obesity must result from either ignorance or lack of willpower – the condition ‘encapsulates’ the antithesis of the moral individual. This moral perspective tends to blur what living massive bodies ‘mean’ to individuals, since willpower is not necessarily at the heart of their own understanding of being large. Based on a case-study of a Norwegian adolescent obesity patient, “Ulrik”, the article investigates how a self-declared “fat-boy” grapples hegemonic understandings of his bodily dimensions. Even as the concept of health looms large, I argue, to Ulrik, being large means being strong – and this is something of a hindrance to his full-hearted embrace of “lifestyle-change”. In obesity, one should strive to understand the circumstances of the individual. The following discussion may be of interest to professionals concerned with how the notion ‘healthy lifestyle’ impacts on modern society.