Liz Webster: Are we becoming fattist?

I recently read an article about a female fitness instructor who weighs 18 stone.

As much as I tell myself (every time I get on the scales actually) that muscle weighs more than fat, there was no disguising the fact she was overweight.

While she claimed to be healthier than a lot of her slimmer friends, she said she had been routinely laughed out of job interviews as soon as people had seen her size.

Looking at her picture I found it hard to imagine paying her to give me fitness advice no matter what her qualifications, which is why I found myself wondering if I am fattist.

If I had questioned her age, gender or race it would be discrimination so why is this different? We're led to assume that obesity is a lack of self-control and comes from laziness and greed.

And while those factors are relevant in some cases, campaigners are now saying that it is society's obsession with being thin that has led to a backlash against those who are overweight.

That increased attacks on the obese come from those who want to attain the perceived physical perfection of being slim, miserably dieting and resenting overweight people for showing them what they fear the most – getting fat.

The same campaigners stormed the office of London mayor Boris Johnson, who consequently announced that prejudice against fat people should be classed as hate crime.

Now I'm not about to start egging obese people in the streets or shouting abuse at someone for eating too many doughnuts but haven't they only got themselves to blame? While the search for eternal youth proves fruitless, weight is something which can be changed.

Perhaps a new law would mean people wouldn't have to take responsibility for what they put into their bodies – 'Don't worry, its not because you ate too much... It's just fattism'.

My usual philosophy is live and let live, I've counted calories for most of my 28 years and I regularly hit the treadmill in the gym, my weight goes up and down but I realise that's my own decision.

But start draining NHS resources and like a 70 stone man in Ipswich get to the stage where its a helicopter to hospital or an XXXL coffin and it becomes a wider (pardon the pun) issue.

Abuse in any form is wrong. If people are happy with their size that's up to them, but we need to remember that unlike birthplace, sexuality or age, we do have a choice over our health and fitness.