Abstract
Overweight and obesity, now at unprecedented prevalence levels, have become critical public health concerns and sources of intense societal debate. Traditional weight-centric approaches to obesity treatment emphasize weight reduction as the primary goal, but such strategies often yield short-term success, significant weight regain, and harmful psychological effects, including stigma and self-esteem damage. In contrast, weight-neutral models such as Health at Every Size (HAES) advocate for a paradigm shift toward reducing weight stigma, promoting holistic health metrics, and acknowledging the intersectional factors contributing to obesity, including socioeconomic, genetic, and environmental influences. While these approaches have made important strides in reshaping clinical communication and reducing provider bias, they do not fully address the structural and environmental barriers that prevent patients in larger bodies from accessing dignified care in the first place. This review examines obesity through a multidisciplinary lens, integrating perspectives from public health, disability studies, and fat activism, and argues that the social model of disability offers a necessary framework for addressing these structural inadequacies. The social model shifts focus from individual pathology to systemic barriers: inadequate medical equipment, hostile clinical environments, and institutional policies that assume bodies conform to narrow standards. By reframing obesity through this lens, healthcare systems can adopt universal design principles that accommodate diverse bodies as standard practice, reducing medical avoidance and improving health outcomes without requiring bodily modification as a prerequisite for care. This paper advocates for a shift from the medicalization of obesity toward recognition of the environmental and structural factors that restrict the participation and well-being of people in larger bodies, fostering more equitable, inclusive, and patient-centered approaches to public health.