ABSTRACT
Rising obesity rates globally are routinely ®gured in contemporary popular, policy and medical representations and debates as being of `epidemic' proportions, constituting a problem against which `war' has been declared. The rapidly proliferating anti-obesity interventions in the arenas of health and food policy, advertising, education and medicine that constitute the `war on obesity' are founded on the assumption that obesity represents a signi®cant, and expensive, threat to health, both nationally and globally (James et al., 2001; NAO, 2001; NICE, 2006; WHO, 2000; see also Gard, Rice, Probyn, Burns et al., LeBesco, all this volume). The `obesity epidemic', therefore, is articulated through the rhetoric of crisis; as an urgent problem against which action must be taken (see Gard, this volume). Alongside this increasingly emphatic construction of obesity as a problem of urgently `epidemic' proportions are the sporadic panics within the developed world, both in the media and in the policy context, around extreme thinness (see, for example, Goodchild and Woolf, 2006). This has occurred most recently in relation to concerns over ultra-thin catwalk models, and the potential role of Size Zero clothing in the production and exacerbation of eating disorders, particularly among girls and young women. However, while some authors and journalists have articulated links between anti-obesity educative strategies and the development of anorexia (Atkins, 2007; Evans et al., 2004; Rich and Evans, 2005), and while both obesity and extreme thinness can be seen as occupying extreme positions on a continuum of body size, it is also problematic to view obesity and eating disorders like anorexia as simple opposites (see also LeBesco, this volume).
