So, what are everyone's thoughts on the EU ruling of obesity becoming a form of disability?

I'm 6ft tall and just under 14 and a half stone. I have been over 15 stone before. For my body frame and muscle mass I am definitely two stone more than I should be at something approaching peak fitness, or fit peakness as my kids like to call it. I feel fat and lazy. I never exercise, I berate myself every day of my life for NOT exercising, I never do anything substantial about it. I used to exercise every day, through work, I was a landscaper and garden builder, I got into pubs, I got out of the habit of exercise, it's difficult to find replacement habits that use the body's energies like that. I can't afford a gym, I hate gyms anyway, there's no swimming pool nearby. I have nowhere to store a bicycle. Eating wise I was brought up by a vegetarian mother and have never eaten a lot of saturated fat or processed foods, I know how to cook well balanced healthy foods and enjoy them but have to force myself to do this rather than go for convenience otherwise I'm sure I would be two or more stone heavier than I am...

These are symptoms of being a human living in a small space in a big city in the 21st century.

Obesity IS a disease and needs to be understood as such, it's all around us and has crept up because of the way we live.

The general contemporary diet and exercise habits are completely out of kilter to what we need as biological beings - we are animals whose bodies have adapted over millions of years to be able to cope with extremes of food availability, from feast to famine. Our bodies are designed to thrive across wide ranging environments, from desert heat to temperate lush valleys from seashores to mountaintops and everything in between. We are designed to be flexible in our habitual existence varying between exercising steadily and frequently interspersed with long relatively sedate periods - as in being active through spring, summer and autumn and relatively couch potato through harsh winters.

We're designed to eat a widely varied diet while coping with widely ranging exercise regimes we encounter in life. And none of the food side of it would include over eating, every meal, three times a day 365 a year with major blow outs along the way to take in special occasions - and drinking alcohol and fizzies all the time too. By and large we live like we're at a never ending festive banquet .

That puts very few people in the position of their lives matching their body's biological needs.

For the amount of exercise we do habitually these days almost all of us eat FAR too much - double what we need - and most of what we eat in the average supermarket led convenience diet is equivalent in body economics terms to a continuous bonanza of pre chewed pre digested fats, sugars and carbohydrates with huge amounts of protein almost no roughage - not even our digestive system needs to work hard to convert it all to fat...

And we get fat. Obesity is a disease CREATED by contemporary society.

We have to eat MUCH less than we do and exercise far MORE than we do. There's no other solution whatsoever.

Our legacy for children is to make sure they grow up with eating and exercise habits that sustain them for adulthood without going into the obese zone... It HAS to start young otherwise it's a lifelong battle of the bulge