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In the face of the ‘obesity epidemic’ public health has largely failed to engage with the human pleasures that surround eating. Pleasures are often linked to vulnerabilities and frailties that are part of being human. We argue in this paper that leaving human vulnerabilities and the pleasures that haunt them under-acknowledged and under-examined within public health contributes to the problems that public health tries to solve. While in some quarters debates revolve around the best ways of encouraging people to become responsible for and modify their own behaviour, the well-documented centuries of struggle with managing human vulnerabilities and pleasures helps to explain why this is no easy task. The mantra of restraint, reason, and rationality is very limited in the face of the importance of some pleasures, even small ones, in human lives. In unequal societies, people have unequal access to pleasures. People are presented with a landscape of temptation, encouraged to consume, and then unequally admonished for indulging according to their means. Understanding and democratising pleasures will involve public health grappling with pleasures, and all those concerned with health inequity asking hard questions about ethics, morality, and intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current preoccupation with body weight in western cultures is arguably unprecedented. The obesity crisis has engaged not only health communities, but numerous other public and private organisations, and, in so doing, has created moral alarm as well as a medical crisis. This paper examines the development of obesity and will discuss the ways in which fatness has been rationalised within health discourses. It will explore the way that the corpulent body, once historically considered as a physiological state, is now regarded as a state of moral pathology representing an 'epidemic'. The prospect of this disease sweeping through populations, reaching into virtually every social group, is presented as all the more frightening when no known effective prevention or cure is at hand. The paper will look at the ways in which new forms of government have developed with the panoptic capacity to gaze across populations and objectify the everyday activities of individuals. This 'government of girth' reaches an apogee in the problematisation of children and body weight. Three subject positions in childhood provide a number of opportunities to problematise children: the sick child, the anti-social child, and the innocent child. Each of these amplifies concern about the state of health of children, the permissive nature of parenting and potential moral social decay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite heightened concerns about levels of obesity and overweight in Western societies, there is a relative absence of sociological research into the subjective experience of dieting, especially for men. This paper focuses on findings related to the male participants from a qualitative study of fourteen volunteers (six female and eight male) drawn from a larger clinical trial comparing two diet conditions. Semi-structured interviews were conducted in two stages to gain an in-depth understanding of the experience of dieting, and found that these men understood and practiced their dieting in different ways from the women, but also from each other, depending on their notions of masculinity. Some were eager to reframe their dieting in 'more manly' terms. The social support or sabotage received from friends and family is significant to these experiences of dieting. This paper discusses how men understand and practice dieting within the framework of gendered discourses and gendered relations that can make healthy eating hard to sustain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]