Obesity Institute: Professor Paul Gately

What led you to your current position at Leeds Beckett?

I was a student at Leeds Beckett in the Carnegie School of Sport, following my undergrad I then did a PhD and took an academic role at the university, and I’ve still retained a part-time role since. I do two days a week at the university, as a Professor, and  three days as a managing director of More Life, a subsidiary company of the university.

I’ve been a professor now for 15 years or so, overseeing  development work on interventions for obesity, primarily focussed on children, but also with a focus on adults.

I led Public Health England’s whole system approaches to obesity. That team continues to grow under the leadership of Dr Duncan Radley, with the knowledge exchange work around whole systems approaches to obesity.

From a research perspective I’ve led quite a lot of research around interventions and impacts of those interventions. But as the complexity of obesity has broadened, so has the range of areas we work on.

The work I’ve been involved in has ranged from basic science, looking at gut hormones around obesity, to looking at social influences around obesity, weight stigma, all those sorts of discriminations and biases, and engaging in obesity policy.
 

What is so exciting about the Obesity Institute?

Having done this for a very long time, what this Institute provides is solutions to problems that I’ve faced in promoting evidence-based practice.

In the early days, working with children living with obesity, there was a focus on diet and exercise, but what has emerged out of that was that there are issues around social, emotional, psychological variables. So working with colleagues in psychology, drawing them in and drawing on that expertise, we sought to understand the interrelationships between the drivers of obesity, how we assess change and how we enact change.

The Obesity Institute gives us access to a wider range of competencies across the university. We have strong relationships in the leadership of the institution, between the Carnegie School of Sport, with the physical activity dimension, and School of Health, with nutrition and dietetics and psychology.

But the Institute also provides a focus on obesity, and people who live with obesity, and using all of the strengths of LBU, right from Leeds School of Arts, to our School of Law, computing expertise, Health, Sport and Education – you can see that rich mix of schools and competencies and expertise being harnessed towards an agenda of making an impact for people who live with obesity.

Is there one factor that can be addressed to better tackle obesity?

I would say that the biggest challenge is that people think there’s one way of dealing with obesity. There needs to be an appreciation that it’s really complex, and if we take a really simplistic approach what we are likely to do is upset and probably hurt a lot of people in front of us.

For me that’s helping people appreciate that obesity is often largely related to the challenges of our daily existence.

Diet and physical activity are the behaviours that we want to engage in changing, so when we’re living through Covid, or you’ve got someone who’s unwell in your family, or you’re facing financial challenges or you’ve got mental health issues, or you’ve got someone in your family facing mental health issues, or a bereavement – you can see all of these social and emotional factors have a direct influence on our ability to make what you might argue are appropriately healthy choices. So, oversimplification for me is a lack of appreciation for the complexity of people’s lives.

Our work in the Institute holds the voice of people living with obesity at the core of what we do, we also recognise the complexity of the problem and we are developing ways and tools to overcome this societal problem.