Being tall is no picnic. Apart from the minor annoyances of people assuming you play basketball or people asking you to get things down from high shelves, you do tend to bump your head more often. I envy shorter people on airplanes and on long-distance buses: they get to enjoy what to me would be first-class seating, while I have to squeeze into a cramped space. They can enjoy a real bath in a standard-sized bathtub, and their feet don’t end up hanging off the end of a standard sized bed.
Advantages: people automatically offer me the shotgun seat in a car, and I get to stand at the back row in group photos, so I can hide my belly.
I’ll take that to mean that, in your opinion, it’s physically impossible for fat people to be anything other than fat without surgery? Do you have some empirical evidence for that?
Addiction is also a choice, in that you can choose to stop being addicted. It’s not easy to do so, obviously, but the option exists.
My point was not so much that people choose to become obese, but that they choose to remain obese in the face of all its disadvantages.
I think the main part of the problem is not addiction, but the simple fact that most fat people have no idea what caused them to become fat in the first place, or how to correct their diet. This is driven in large part by ridiculous advice put out by eg. the USDA, most of which is of a similar quality to ‘leeches can be used for curing a fever’ or ‘the cause of stillborn babies is witches’.
I would say it’s entirely down to incorrect advice. If an obese patient has the will and the motivation to lose weight, there’s really only one thing that can prevent them from doing so: authoritative advice that cannot possibly work.
Surgery, incidentally, doesn’t work either in most cases, because having a normal-sized stomach is not the cause of obesity.
Was it you who mentioned ‘feeders?’. I’ve noticed that most people who are morbidly obese have “carers” who deliberately provide them with fattening food. Since they’re often immobile, it would be impossible for them to maintain their weight without that sort of “assistance”.
