Piers Morgan backs Bill Maher's call for fat-shaming, says society should stop celebrating 'morbid obesity'
Piers Morgan has never been one to shy away from a controversial opinion, and on the most recent episode of 'Good Morning Britain', he spoke out in support of Bill Maher's call to bring back fat-shaming.
Piers made the comments while he, along with co-hosts Susanna Reid and Charlotte Hawkins, were talking about how 'The Late Late Show' host James Corden criticized Maher for making the suggestion, according to the Daily Star.
During an appearance on HBO's 'Real Time' last week, the 63-year-old Maher had said, "Being fat isn't a birth defect, nobody comes out of the womb needing to buy two seats on the airplane. We scream at Congress to find a way to pay our medical bills, but it wouldn't be nearly the issue it is if people just didn't eat like a*******."
"Fat shaming doesn’t need to end, it needs to make a comeback," he continued. "Shame is the first step in reform."
Corden hit back at those comments during his show, saying, "It's proven that fat-shaming only does one thing. It makes people feel ashamed and shame leads to depression, anxiety, and self-destructive behavior — self-destructive behavior like overeating."
While Corden's comments were hailed on social media, Morgan, unsurprisingly, took Maher's side and said the comedian had "rightly outlined" the problem.
"What did Bill Maher say that's wrong?" Morgan asked Reid and Hawkins. "We've become a society now where we don’t just tolerate morbid obesity, we celebrate it."
"We put people who are 320 pounds [145kg] on the cover of some glossy magazines and say, 'Isn't this empowering?'" he said, likely about his feud with model and body positivity advocate Tess Holiday concerning her appearance on the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine's October 2018 issue.
"That's the problem Bill Maher's rightly outlined to me," he continued. "Stop celebrating being massively overweight. I don’t know how we get people really to lose weight if we don't say to them, come on, enough, stop."
He said he would be quite happy if Reid fat-shamed him. "I think the best way to lose weight is when someone goes, 'Blimey you've put on a bit, son'. So you feel a bit insecure and then you go off and reduce one Big Mac a day to half a Big Mac, and so you go on."