Framing the obesity crisis as an aggregation of poor lifestyle, food and exercise choices fails to see and respond to its real lived experience.
Giving people access to the latest knowledge, digital technologies, tools and trackers may make some impact but this solution lies within the same problem framing - one steeped in the language of responsibility, optimisation, and self-management. One that positions the individual person and their body as the problem to be fixed, and the solution as a series of measurable actions to be taken: eat less, move more, try harder, comply better.
From a real lived experience (RLX) perspective, this is not only insufficient but a fundamental category mistake.
Obesity is not a discrete bodily thing, a kind of pathology extracted from its context and analysed in isolation. Nor is it simply a matter of energy imbalance or lifestyle missteps.
It is a complex, lived condition that arises in and through social, material, economic, affective, and environmental relations.
And it is experienced as a body in this relational field, not just in the body: in shame, in pain, in bias and exclusion, in stigma, in the friction of everyday life.
To reduce this experience to weight, BMI, exercise or willpower is to sever it from its reality.
RLX invites a shift from obesity as a condition to be managed to obesity as a lived experience field to be perceived, understood, and transformed with those living it. That means:
Perceiving not just food intake and physical activity, but how time, space, stress, trauma, precarity, and relational dynamics shape what, when, why and how people eat, move, and live.
Understanding how meanings around bodies, value, shame, success, and effort are culturally produced and internalised.
Attuning to the ways in which stigma, surveillance, and reductive advice often reinforce the very experiences of isolation, self-blame and loss of agency that make transformation harder.
And crucially, RLX does not assume that change should always mean weight loss. It asks instead: what is the movement in this person’s life that feels meaningful, valued, and supported? What are the ruptures they live through? What are the thresholds they’re trying to cross? What relational and environmental changes are needed, not just individual ones?
In this way, RLX shifts the conversation away from blame and behaviour toward a deeper perception of how health is actually lived - within the layered, often invisible realities of our lives. It invites us not to fix individuals, but to co-compose new conditions with them: to engage the relational, environmental, cultural, and affective forces that shape their everyday worlds.
This is not another version of the social determinants model, nor is it systems thinking repackaged. RLX offers a more elemental perceptual reorientation, one that seeks to sense the hidden real of experience as it unfolds, ruptures, and recomposes beneath the surface of categories, causes, and interventions.
And that perceptual shift, if truly taken up, marks the beginning of something far more transformative than just another intervention.
It becomes a new foundation for public health itself.