'mizimoocow': 'What helped me was cognitive behavioural therapy'

I've spent my entire life embracing my curves, or more specifically one giant curve – the red line that separates people with a normal BMI and all those people like me: the overweight and obese. By 15, I was 15 stone (95kg). No matter how hard I stuck at WeightWatchers' meals, nothing would shift the weight. But then I found a much easier way: I stuck my fingers down my throat.

What did eventually help me maintain a lower BMI for the past few years was receiving cognitive behavioural therapy on a medical trial at Oxford University. You see, people like me hug the line. I have a middling low-grade weight problem and a middling low-grade eating disorder that exclude me from NHS help. Basically, I'm like 90% of the UK's overweight population – except I was lucky enough to live next to a university city where trials give access to the kinds of real help that fix individual's broken relationships with food.

To someone with an eating disorder, raising the price of a Coca-Cola can by 50p would achieve nothing. There's a reason why obesity is associated with low-income families: if you're asset poor but pocket-change rich, Kit Kats, crisps and soda become one of the few ways to derive pleasure from life while everyone else is on holiday, at ballet, or horse riding, regardless of whether this type of gratification leads to poor health.

By all means tax sugary drinks at a higher rate, but unless that money is poured into alleviating the root causes of obesity: child poverty, poor social mobility and lack of services, people like me will just end up poorer. Not thinner.

Robyn Cutforth: 'Engage with us, instead of lecturing us'

Food, bingeing and my weight have dominated a huge part of my life from puberty to the present day: I'm clinically obese. For me the obesity debate is oversimplified, dangerously moralising, class-led and, worst of all, missing the point. Politicians and clinicians alike love to play the blame game: working mothers, the poor, the media, the NHS, society, the food itself. I only blame myself because it is my fault.

My binge-eating habits are not without reason, but they are all mine and they are without outside influence. I cannot comment on others' reasons and causes; no one feasibly can because they are so diverse and personal. The focus needs to shift from causes and blame to empathy and education. None of the policymakers care to ask people who are overweight or obese what we need, we are treated like children or zoo animals. The "obese" are not a different species to be gawped at and prodded. There are those who are obese and are not a drain on NHS services or society: they are healthy, happy people who don't need any Victorian-style paternalist intervention. I wish I were one of them. The help I'm receiving at the moment, courtesy of the NHS, is psychological and it is this kind of service, as well as cognitive therapies, subsidised exercise, diet programmes, and in-school education that will help the many. Engaging with us directly, instead of lecturing, alienating, or demeaning us, would be a welcome first step.

Samantha Whyte: 'It is an addiction like any other'

I'm in recovery from binge-eating disorder and bulimia using the same 12-step plan used by alcoholics and heroin users. Through recognising my powerlessness over food and practising mindful eating I have maintained an 8st weight loss. We cannot tackle obesity without recognising that compulsive overeating is an addiction like any other. The notion of a "fat tax", like taxes on alcohol and cigarettes, fundamentally misunderstands the nature of addiction. Alcoholics will have their cheap cider, food addicts will have their refined carbohydrates. It may be at the expense of other necessities, but addicts will have their oblivion.

Anna Soubry's recent comments made me realise how class-based this discourse has become. She suggested that overeating was simply working-class fecklessness, a result of moral weakness personified by the so-called "underclass". If obesity does disproportionately affect the working class, it's likely because the better off are more likely to have access to resources that identify compulsive eating as a problem and have it appropriately treated. It is certainly not just those with a diagnosable disorder that eat addictively; using the criteria used by the NHS for substance misuse (inability to stop once you have started, guilt afterwards, damaging relationships) the net could be cast so much wider. Until we tackle the root cause of food addiction we cannot tackle obesity. We now have very effective bariatric surgery, the food addict's equivalent of Antabuse or a naltrexone implant, but it can only tackle the symptom, not the disease that caused it.

Amy Godfrey: 'We must change fat identity'

I have always been a little bit fat – not fat enough to get bariatric surgery on the NHS but fat enough to get directed to the maternity section in M&S. I've tried a lot of diets, failed a lot of diets and gained and lost the same amount of stone numerous times. It's who I am and has all kinds of impact on how I think of myself, and on how others think of me and treat me as a result.

Obesity is complicated and a major health issue – we're surrounded by high-fat, high-sugar foods that are heavily subsidised; we cook less, we eat out more. Poverty, lack of time and education all play a part and living more sedentary lives affects our health and our waistlines. Neoliberalism makes our value primarily as consumers and not as citizens, capitalism results in overproduction that requires us to sell stuff by making people feel rubbish about themselves.

I don't think obesity is really all about health. If it was, we'd accept that dieting doesn't work and that you don't need to be an ideal weight to be healthy – we'd stop using weight as an indicator for health and address discrimination against fat people as it's bad for their health. I found, even in myself, that it is not the aesthetic of fat that I don't like, it's what it means. Lazy, stupid, ugly, inconsiderate are all characteristics attributed to obesity – who would choose such an identity? Until we change fat identity and show bigger people that they have any worth, we can't expect them to care for themselves – dieting and fat-shaming will never be the answer.

Dr Eugenia Cheng: 'Losing weight is harder than rocket science'

I lost 50lb (22.7kg), going from size 18 to 8. Losing weight and keeping it off is extremely difficult because everyone is against you – your friends, colleagues and the massive food industry. I'm a senior lecturer of mathematics at the University of Sheffield; as an intelligent, educated woman, I am not "supposed" to care about how I look. I could say I did it for health reasons, but I did it to look good. And what's wrong with that?

There will be the inevitable smug comments on this article, about how losing weight is easy: eat less, exercise more. It's a bit like treating depression by telling people to cheer up. "It's not rocket science," people say. Well, actually, as a mathematician, I think rocket science is pretty easy, whereas losing weight is hard. People make fun of me and insult me all the time. They laugh at the healthy food I eat, they insult me for paying to go to the gym and they tell me I'm doing things "wrong", despite my evident success. And this is before even mentioning the efforts of the food industry to get us to consume more, preferably unhealthy, food. I think that taxing unhealthy food will make more money for the NHS to deal with obesity, but it's unlikely to affect people's habits. It won't change public opinion about healthy eating, and the stigma of "being on a diet".

'Weightlossbitch': 'Address the root cause'

I finally got the push I needed when I was constantly told that weight-loss surgery was the only option for me. Along with a diagnosis of diabetes and a severe endometrial condition, and a chat with a rather inspiring psychologist, I knew I needed to change. At 43st 5.5lbs I was literally eating myself to death and I knew I had to take action. One year later, and more than 10st lighter, I have managed to lose more than 23% of my starting weight through healthy eating and exercise … no pills, no surgery, no magic cure. It has been hard, there have been tears and tantrums, and there have been times when I desperately wanted to make friends with the local Chinese takeaway again.

Is there an obesity crisis? Absolutely. Will surgery and quick fixes solve this problem – long term? Absolutely not. The one thing that I have been crying out for over the past 10 years has been psychological support. There is a clear and distinct need to address the underlying issues that make people eat to extremes; without this, no surgical intervention will work, no diet pills will work, and no amount of demeaning obese people will work. Identification of the root cause, and dealing with those issues identified, works. It was the intervention of one man, during a 30-minute consultation, that helped to set me straight.