IT’S sort of awesome, in the true sense of inspiring awe, that with all the developments of our modern age, all the whizz bang distractions, our absolute fascination with other people’s bodies remains immutable.

It has been several centuries since being fat was an admired, socially valuable state of being but, as my gran used to say, the old style comes back in again.

Fat, we know, is a feminist issue, given the fetishisation and judgement of women’s bodies. Too fat, too thin, too flat chested, never enough showing off of their curves on the front of magazines.

Fat is also a loaded, loaded word.

What synonyms come with fat? Lazy, gluttonous, ugly. I remember several years ago reading a feature piece in a Sunday magazine, an interview with two journalists who had written and were promoting a diet book.

I’m paraphrasing, but it stuck in my head that one of the women said, “I disliked being obese because I worried people would think I was less intelligent than I am.”

It seems quite a reach to assume fat people must be stupid but I suppose the link is the assumption they don't can't make judgements on the correct things to put in their bodies.

There’s little worse than to be called fat when one is thin. I saw on Twitter recently a woman write that a man on a dating app had responded to her profile to call her fat.

The company behind the app then sent her flowers to make it up to her, such is the power of the F insult.

When we talk sympathetically about fat people it is to talk about how over-eating is caused by boredom, economic issues and low self-esteem.

This sympathetic positioning of giving sensitive reasons for people’s choices is still denigrating fat people but kindly. It’s not their fault, you see, fat people are just really sad or poor.

And of course people do eat because they are sad. Just as they eat for comfort, they eat for joy. They also eat because it tastes good, it brings pleasure, it is a sensorially delightful pastime.

Now fat prejudice has become a social talking point. Rather than condemning individual fat people for being greedy sloths, rather than merely giving them side-eye on public transport for taking up too much space, or scorning them in restaurants for daring to order a pudding, we’ve now found a new way of judging fat people by making it a political problem.

As it was labelled an “obesity epidemic”, fat became a public issue. No longer did those who feel disgust towards fat people have to swallow their condemnatory comments.

Instead, it’s open season because obesity is a social concern. You can’t just be fat in isolation anymore. Fat people are a burden on the NHS from all their associated health risks - breathing troubles, Type II diabetes, heart disease, cancer… and so it’s acceptable to express disgust disguised by the polite medium of concern.

“Why don't you diet before you die young.” Won’t anyone think of the osteoarthritis? Instead of acknowledging bullying of fat people, the goalposts have been shifted and an excuse found for the bullying. Fat people are disliked for taking a somewhat a conservative approach, that the individual’s choice to be a size 22 outweighs the potential unnecessary impact on society.

Malnutrition also places a burden on the NHS but no one is lining up to scorn people who don’t eat properly or carers who don’t feed their charges.

In response to all this, being fat is almost an act of valour. Running the gauntlet of judgement every day, maligned personally and politically.

And so, as it has happened many times before and will many times again, people who share a common quality and who are maligned and marginalised begin to organise.

They take the lexicon of their oppression and reclaim it for themselves. The fat acceptance movement has a new lexicon whereby fat activists talk of anti-fat bias and fatphobia.

The singer and actress Lizzo is a public face of this shift in attitude from hailing thin as virtuous to praising bodies in all their shapes and sizes. She is utterly unabashed in loving her fat body - habit nearly had me type "curvy" there - and women love her for it.

Nike was both praised and denigrated for its recent plus-sized shop dummies, which make the point that exercise is for everyone. Exercise is beneficial to everyone and important, but not everyone approved of seeing a fat gym-goer, not even one made from resin.

Vogue, Cosmopolitan and Glamour magazines have all had plus-size models on the cover, again prompting delight from some and condemnation of condoning "unhealthy" fatness.

Among the attempts to normalise fat bodies, popular culture still uses fat as a punchline to a joke - the movie Avengers: Endgame made a running gag from podgy Thor, eating his feelings - and drowning them in beer. Ha.

Campaigners are trying to reverse decades of bullying, ostracising and cruelty so it's no surprise that Cancer Research UK's latest advertising campaign caused outrage in seemingly blaming fat people for their own cancer. The adverts make a direct comparison between smoking and obesity as personal choices that must be reversed.

Yet smoking was once a glamorous pastime promoted by movie stars, now recognised as a lethal addiction. Obesity is a far more emotive, complex issue to confront.

To be fair to Cancer Research UK, it is very difficult to apply nuance and complexity to public discourse, never mind public health campaigns.

To be effective, they must be quick, snappy and clearly understood. There’s less basis than you'd imagine, say, for five-a-day. In other countries it’s seven-a-day or nine-a-day. Some break it down to be a ratio that is higher in veg to fruit.

A lengthy debate over the nutritional value of fructose is not going to encourage the populace to eat more broccoli than apples. Five-a-day. It’s so easy you can count it on the fingers of one hand.

As with so much public discourse, nuance is a problem. Doctors say that obesity can kill a person, doctors say obesity is not a choice but a cause of outside factors. Doctors say you can be fit and fat, others say you can't. Some of us are not trying to get to terms with the difference between visceral fat and subcutaneous.

While fat pride is a political response to an ongoing subjugation of those who don't fit the slim ideal, is there a limit to fat acceptance? Is it possible to say love thyself while also acknowledging that being a size 30 comes with health complications?

It's not easy to make these opposing positions co-exist but a first step is to de-fang the word "fat" and uncouple it from the hefty baggage it has long dragged around. That's one weight it shouldn't be too hard to shed.