Has the media exaggerated the health threat of obesity?

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They aren't exaggerated, being obese is detrimental to health and lowers life expectancy. It's not healthy to be obese or else we'd all be obese by default.

That's not true. Not every body type is meant to be large or small. My metabolism is s**t. Even when I'm in a healthy weight range, I look chunky. My body shape is meant to be a fatass. Does that mean I deserve everyone getting in my face even though I eat like a reasonable human being? Not everyone who is obese wants to be that way. Actually, I would throw it out there that the majority of obese people don't want to be that way. :/

I know that, I'm not saying everyone must be small. Just have a healthy body weight, and no one with an average body weight is obese since the whole idea of obesity is being unhealthily above normal weight for your height.

I'm just saying that I still look "fat" when I'm within the healthy body range for my height according to BMI. I was still treated like a fat person since I still needed plus sized clothes. I have to starve myself in order to look "average." >.<

I probably don't have the genes to be "obese by default". There was a time when I ate burgers and fries everyday and I never gained much weight.

I wish the anorexia health threat would get an equal amount of attention as obesity

By the way, everyone is an individual. If your family has a history of being fat and living long lives going back to times when being fat wasn't nearly as common, then you being fat probably isn't as bad for you as it is for someone who has nothing but skinny people in their family.

My Dad's side of the family is full of fat people, no diabetes. I'm talking about fat 80 year olds with pictures of themselves during the 1930s with their fat parents.

There are plenty of people like this. There have been actual experiments done to see if they could get thin people to put ON weight...they found they had to eat a ridiculous number of calories to put on even moderate amounts of weight, and it was next to impossible to maintain the higher weight because they simply couldn't eat that much. It's as possible to make a thin person permanently fatter as it is to make a fat person permanently thinner - i.e. pretty hard, and in a fair number of people, impossible.

And, PS, I've known a few people like this, who genuinely struggled to put on weight. I have one friend who's been tiny all her life, she and her husband were trying for a baby, and her doctor told her putting on weight would be her best way of improving her chances - but however much she ate, it just didn't work. She was about to go for IVF when she was diagnosed with MS, and now she can't have IVF because it would mean going off her MS medication. And they can't adopt because her husband (who's also thin BTW) has diabetes. Sometimes life sucks.