Piers Morgan has backed Bill Maher’s call for fat-shaming to ‘make a comeback’.
The American TV presenter told his audience on his HBO show Real Time with Bill Maher that ‘some amount of shame is good’.
James Corden hit back at his comments on his own programme The Late Late Show.
He said: ‘Fat-shaming only does one thing, it makes people feel ashamed, and shame leads to depression, anxiety and self-destructive behaviour like over eating.’
On Good Morning Britain, Piers sided with 63-year-old Bill, saying: ‘We’ve become a society now where we don’t tolerate morbid obesity, we celebrate it.
‘Stop celebrating being massively overweight. I don’t know how you get people to lose weight unless you say, come on. Enough.
‘Is there a way to tackle chronic obesity, to stop putting massive models on the cover of magazines and say this ain’t so great.
‘We put people who are 320 pounds on the cover of glossy magazines and say “isn’t this empowering?” and this is the problem that Bill Maher has rightly identified to me.’
He added that he would be ‘quite happy’ with his co-host Susanna Reid fat-shaming him.
Piers went on: ‘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 go you go on.’
The Gavin and Stacey star drew on his own experiences to respond to Maher in a passionate speech on his show.
‘Fat-shaming never went anywhere,’ he explained: ‘Ask literally any fat person, we are reminded of it all the time on airplane, on Instagram, when someone leaves a pie on the windowsill to cool and they look at us.
‘There’s a common and insulting misconception that fat people are stupid and lazy and we’re not. We get it, we know.’
He added: ‘We know that being overweight isn’t good for us and I’ve struggled my entire life trying to manage my weight and I suck at it.’
Good Morning Britain airs weekdays at 6am on ITV.
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