In the US, in contrast, she said that “we have fashion magazines with scantily clad women but you don’t see those kind of porny images in public as much. I felt part of the reason I got harassed in London was because there were messages everywhere that women’s bodies are public property.”

She acknowledged that in many cases, aggression towards fat people also stems from a conviction that being overweight is unhealthy. While promoting Dietland in Australia, Walker was invited to appear on a live radio show with the British novelist Will Self. He interrupted the discussion of Walker’s book to lecture her about how unhealthy and ugly it is to be fat.

In London in December 2015, a police investigation was launched after a group of men calling themselves Overweight Haters Ltd allegedly handed out fat-shaming cards to women on the tube. The cards were initially reported by 30-year-old Kara Florish, who tweeted a photo of a card she was handed reading: “We do not understand why you fail to grasp that by eating less you will be better off, slimmer, happy and find a partner who is not a perverted chubby-lover, or even find a partner at all… You are a fat, ugly human.”

Susie Orbach, the author of radical 1978 book Fat is a Feminist Issue, has said that society struggles to accept fat people because of the assumption that overweight people have lost their self-control. That, she told the BBC, is frightening. “Most people want to be slim, but this perceived physical perfection is difficult to hold on to and they fear losing control of it… They project that fear and unhappiness on to people who are bigger and that often translates into abuse and attacks.”

However, Walker told The Guardian that many contemporary fat activists reject the argument, made by Orbach in Fat is a Feminist Issue, that being fat is also the consequence of psychological damage. “One of the things I push back against in Dietland is the idea that fat is an outer representation of some kind of inner trauma,” she said. Rather than being a negative, she said, fat can be “neutral or positive thing”.

Images: iStock

“London is the most fat-shaming place I've ever been”: author speaks out against weight discrimination