On 11th July the cohort behind the co-designed Obesity Justice Pamphlet held an evening event with a select group to share insights, learnings, and aims of the Pamphlet. These are the 3 presentations in audio format that took place.

Exploring the Potential of Micro-Grants as a Pathway to Healing and Health Justice for People Living with Obesity 

As a first step towards obesity health justice, we have created The People’s Obesity Pamphlet, a resource for the people, by the people. This is a tool for harm reduction and the promotion of autonomy for people who are experiencing obesity.

Here we provide a brief overview of the creation of “The People’s Obesity Justice Pamphlet”.

This work aims to demonstrate the harm of the dominant, individualised, narrative of obesity. We present an alternative understanding that views obesity through a neuro-epidemiological, environmental and sociopolitical lens. This serves as an avenue for people who are experiencing obesity to understand their disease and explore potential methods of self-care, self-advocacy and safeguarding.

Trauma also creates systemic biological and cellular changes. For example, it can change our gut bacteria environment, which has implications for obesity. In cases of acute trauma, some can experience PTSD, which creates neurobiological abnormalities which alters the function of various biological systems, this too has implications for obesity.

Type 2 diabetes is a metabolic disorder, which prevents the body’s ability to regulate glucose, it can turn into a lifelong condition, when it is not caught early or left untreated.

Obesity is a dysregulated production of adipose tissue commonly known as fat throughout the body. It is considered a complex and chronic disease, which means there are multiple factors that contribute to its aestology.

At the crux of this theory is that when the body is faced with stressors it adapts through a process called allostasis, which means “achieving stability/homeostasis through change”.

Air pollution presents a particularly insidious hazard given that the disease affects respiratory and cardio-vascular systems (source). These two systems are sensitive to air pollution as air pollution directly damages the mechanics and as a consequence the function of lungs, heart, and the circulatory system.

Our body does not only suffer chronic stress due to pollutants. Psychosocial factors also play a part in our long-term health. The psychosocial relationship to health is a widely investigated field.

Allostasis and Allostatic Overload are states in which the system enters a dysregulated stress response. Non-communicable diseases have been shown to be associated with Allostasis.

The body enters an allostatic state when allostasis has been active for a long period of time, and thus the mediators are deviated from their normal levels to a new set point, that can be lower or higher than the normal one. Being in an allostatic state comes at a cost to the body, especially when responding to chronic stressors that prevent the stress response from turning off.

A stressor is defined as a novel threatening environmental agent that alters the baseline human biological system in either of two ways: bringing the system to an unstable biological state, or slowing down the system’s internal response so that it cannot reach equilibrium.