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While this is an obviously contentious statement, we take this as the starting point for our analysis and efforts to expand the currently truncated obesity debate beyond its medicalised and reductionist focus on disease, risk and pathology. In saying that there is no such thing as obesity we don’t mean to imply that no one is fat. What we are saying is that the term ‘obesity’–and more especially its assumed precursor ‘overweight’with which it is often conflated–as currently used in the clinical and academic worlds with which we are familiar has little medical salience. For a very high percentage of populations reputedly in the grip of an ‘obesity epidemic’(the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada for example) fatness and/or heavy bodyweight (taken as indicating overweight or obesity) do/does not, as is popularly promulgated, reliably indicate a person’s metabolic risk, except at extremes of the weight spectrum. By …