Beyond individual behavior: a multidimensional review of the health, psychological, social, and economic contexts of obesity

Obesity continues to rise worldwide despite unprecedented health awareness and an expanding dieting culture. This narrative review moves beyond an individual-behavioral understanding of obesity by synthesizing evidence on its health, economic, psychological, and social dimensions and proposing a cross-domain framework that grades the evidence supporting each pathway. A structured, non-systematic search of six databases (January 2010–March 2026) identified 57 sources, prioritizing systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and longitudinal studies. Obesity is a chronic, multisystem disease affecting more than 1 billion people, and the recent distinction between clinical and preclinical obesity shifts attention from body size to functional consequences. Its economic burden extends beyond healthcare costs to lost productivity and wage penalties, while household costs, including long-term pharmacotherapy, remain largely unquantified. Obesity and depression show a bidirectional association that may be sustained by internalized weight stigma and shared inflammatory-metabolic pathways. Socially, obesity is associated with employment discrimination, barriers in romantic relationships, and bullying. Although most evidence is observational, these dimensions appear mutually reinforcing, with obesity acting as both an outcome and a contributor, which may explain why behavior-focused interventions alone have not reversed the epidemic. Studies integrating several dimensions within the same population remain scarce, particularly in Arab and Gulf populations, where existing evidence addresses prevalence, cost, stigma, and policy separately. Integrated longitudinal research and multidisciplinary prevention strategies, including in Gulf contexts, are needed.