[thegreenswede]

Family member is. And it's a massive burden on their time and all their coworkers. More than you could imagine. So yeah, it has real world implications that we have to 'accept' the fact that half our population is killing themselves or making their existing conditions much worse because they're so overweight. The member of my family member estimated that easily 50%+ of their time is used dealing with issues stemming from their weight (think special sized beds, extra manual labor for patient transportation, extra resources needed for surgery, extra resources needed for long term hospital stays, etc). So it's a bit annoying that you casually sweep this away as an 'online only' problem when its a massive drain on our limited healthcare resources but you can't even question why we put up with it or God forbid people should lose some weight to make dealing with all the other health issues less costly.

[sverona]

Forgive me, but are that many people that morbidly obese and adamant that it's not their responsibility when they're in the dang hospital? I'm carrying around a few dozen extra pounds, but I don't need special-sized anything.

The bitter truth is that people don't lose weight because it's goddamn fucking hard.

[thegreenswede]

Few dozen extra pounds is not what is causing the issues like making surgery or care hard. It's not that there's that so so many (quick search shows 20% of ICU patients are morbidity obese) but that caring for that percentage takes larger amount of the resources. From what my family member tells me, the situation is like this: for issue X you might stay in an ICU bed for Y days. For a morbidly obese patient, the care or operation can take an extra day (need special resources) but worse, they take much longer to heal or be in good enough shape to leave the bed. So they stay in the beds much longer. Basically the same issue we saw with covid: when people stay in the ICU beds longer and longer it quickly sucks up all available resources. Add up all the extra complications needed to care for the obese and that it's becoming more and more common, you start to see the issues pile up.