The unsustainable weight. The price of obesity.

"What is obesity? Obesity is a worm that while you eat, eat you inside. It’s watching a beautiful world, where people live, and you, as a viewer you survive. Is look at yourself in the mirror, and close your eyes hoping to be someone else, is always living on the edge, hoping not to be seen. Is feel yourself "different", is a long list of "I can not" (C. Gargiulo, M. Biglia, Togliamoci il peso)

Our body is our home, our safe place, on it we bring the signs of our lives and scars that tell our story. Through the body we express our emotions, we explore the world around us, we do it ours. But for those who are obese, the body becomes an inhospitable place, where do not identify themselves, a prison from which they can not escape.

The unsustainable weight tells the life of Gianni, forty-year-old Roman, who suffers from obesity since many years. Tells of his solitude, his difficulties, and the unsustainable weight, emotional and physical, to face his own life as obese.

Gianni over time, has lost and increased weight, reaching more than 300 kg, he has always fought with his body, and obesity has deeply influenced his affective life and his work. Does not have a stable job (currently assembles video for a webTV), he is separated and lives in an apartment located in the house of his parents in a condo full of steep and narrow stairs that makes strenuous leaving home.

Contrary to what people think, obesity is not a fault, is not caused by laziness, and not be solved simply by dieting. Obesity is a chronic invalidating disease, caused by multiple factors (genetic predisposition, environmental factors, eating habits, metabolic disorders, mood and personality disorders etc.), and is accompanied in many cases to psychological distress, depression, isolation and difficulties in social relationships. Who is obese, lives comparing himself with physical limitations, and with the judgment of a society increasingly oriented towards standards of beauty that enhance the thinness, and often suffers discrimination, result of prejudice.

Obesity or globesity, has become in the last decade a global problem, and is now considered by WHO like an epidemic that threatens the health of all nations. Currently, in the world, the percentage of obese people, is growing faster than that of people who suffer from hunger or malnutrition. The worldwide data, are staggering: 1.9 billion of adults and 45 million children under 5 are overweight or obese (WHO Report 2001; WHO 2014 data).

The unsustainable weight, tells how people suffering from this disease, they face every day a world, that feel inhospitable, as Gianni says "An obese does not go to the cinema or theater because there are no chairs large and strong enough, the first thing that thinks coming to a new place, is if the doors are wide enough. I live as a disabled person, but the other people do not understand it. Obese people do not need compassion, it would be much more useful, that people know more of this problem".