I was in hospital last year for one of those endless bloody check-ups you get at my age if you have an iffy family history. The doctor asked me how I’d lost weight. Drugs? Yeah, nah, I’m a medical miracle. Lost 57 kilos in 2009 and have kept most of it off.

Whether you lose weight through dieting or injections is unimportant. Credit: Richard Giliberto

Diet and exercise, I said. Good on you, he replied cheerily. His meaning? That taking weight-loss drugs is somehow cheating.

You’re a tiny bit vulnerable when you are on your back with beeping things attached to you, so I couldn’t tell him to get lost. Unusual for me.

The skinny among us have no idea what it’s like to be fat, overweight, obese. They think it’s just a matter of willpower. “If only you’d stop stuffing your face.” But everything around us encourages us to stuff our faces. The world we live in is completely obesogenic. From what’s in the supermarket aisles to the way our working lives are designed to make us sit on our bums for hours at a time to the........

© The Sydney Morning Herald