Love your fat child, don’t shame them

Marianne Kirby: If your child is fat, it's far more important to let them know they are loved than to encourage them to diet

All shapes and sizes

Lucy Aphramor: It is counterproductive to pour money and effort into making everyone slim – let's encourage an ethical approach to weight

This pill is a cheap, nasty way out of dealing with the real causes of obesity

Zoe Williams: It suits policymakers to offer the overweight a magic bullet: better than facing expensive stuff like economic hopelessness

Weighing up the costs of being obese

Obesity is becoming analogous to the smoking debate. So will future carbon taxes place a burden on the overweight, asks Leo Hickman

Carbon emissions fuelled by high rates of obesity

Overweight causing 1bn extra tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions every year, say experts

£1-a-day diet drug promises weight loss

But doctors warn that eating healthily and exercising is the only surefire way to stay slim

NHS trusts see spending on obesity rise seven-fold in three years

Obesity data collated by NHS shows high demand in many trusts for stomach surgery and gastric bypasses

Running on empty carbs

They finish their cereal and snack on nuts and fruit juice. So, how could they possibly get fat? Andrew Purvis on the middle-class myth of healthy-eating

Taking the biscuit

Nicholas Lezard: The meddling doctor who wants us to cut down on chocolate should know that the slap-a-tax-on-it method rarely works

The Hard Sell: Change4Life

David Stubbs on Change4Life