The most common view of obesity among the U.S. public is that obesity is a personal problem of bad choices. But among Canadians — especially French-speaking Canadians — the most common view is that it is a community problem of shared risk. This is important because prior research has shown that when people understand obesity as a problem of shared risks, they are more open to evidence-based solutions for obesity and less prone to express bias against people with obesity.

In this research, we examined the experiences of individuals living with obesity, the perceptions of health care providers, and the role of social, institutional, and political structures in the management of obesity. We used feminist poststructuralism as the guiding methodology because it questions everyday practices that many of us take for granted. We identified three key themes across the three participant groups: blame as a devastating relation of power, tensions in obesity management and prevention, and the prevailing medical management discourse. Our findings add to a growing body of literature that challenges a number of widely held assumptions about obesity within a health care system that is currently unsupportive of individuals living with obesity. Our identification of these three themes is an important finding in obesity management given the diversity of perspectives across the three groups and the tensions arising among them.