[king_jester]

> I don't care if someone is fat. What I care about is the loons saying that it's healthy and fine to be morbidly obese and they use stuff like this to back it up.

Being morbidly obese and healthy? Very unlikely to be true. Morbidly obese and ok with? That's 100% legit, it's your body and you are free to do as you please.

> No, it's calories in vs calories out. Maybe these bacteria make you want to eat more, maybe they somehow pull more energy out of food than normal gut flora somehow, in the end it doesn't really matter. Eat less, lose weight; eat more, gain weight; the definition of 'more' and 'less' are individual.

Except we already have strong evidence to suggest that calorie deficit diets do not have a causal relationship with weight loss and that those diets are hard to maintain over a long period of time, leading people to have yo-yo issues with their weight.

> I don't care if someone is fat.

When you call fat acceptance folks loons, I don't think you can say that with a straight face.

[sp332]

Except we already have strong evidence to suggest that calorie deficit diets do not have a causal relationship with weight loss

I don't know if you meant something else here, but of course eating less causes weight loss.

[indiecore]

There are people who don't believe that. Every time I hear about it I tell them to get to a physics lab because they are a walking Nobel Prize.

[terio]

Obviously eating less will cause weight loss. The problem is actually being able to eat less and to keep doing that for life. Maybe that is not a problem for you ... so far, but it is a real problem for many people.

This article could shed more light on the obesity problem and solutions to it. For example, it could very well be that our intestinal flora influences our own decision making. There is at least one known case of a micro-organism that does: the toxoplasma gondii.

It is also apparent that people become addict to sugar and that definitely would influence decision making.

On top of that, our behavior is in great extent influenced, if not determined, by the chemistry of our bodies. It may very well be that chemical imbalances caused by a combination of diet, intestinal flora and hormones, causes obesity.

In short, saying that it is simply a problem of calories in and calories out is a gross over-simplification of the problem. Science is way beyond that point.

[sp332]

Not to mention non-fad weight loss programs like Weight Watchers, and all the starving scrawny people in the world as evidence.

[leephillips]

"it's your body and you are free to do as you please."

When obese people fly they rarely buy two seats. They can pretend that their state of health doesn't affect the people around them, but they are deceiving themselves.

[fotbr]

I'm still technically obese, but better than I was. I'm big, but I'm not exceptionally wide. If I was an inch taller, I'd merely be "overweight". If I were 4 inches taller, I'd be pretty close to "normal" weight.

I fit in a standard airline seat without hanging over the armrest into the next seat, so why should I pay for it? So yeah, my state of health isn't particularly good right now, but it actually isn't affecting anyone I fly with.

Blanket generalizations don't do anyone any good.

[leephillips]

Allow me to disagree; the capacity to generalize is at the core of much progress in human thought.

Of course there will always be those who insist on missing the forest for a tree or two -- the forest in this case being my attempt to keep in mind a wholly unoriginal thought: we are not isolated, and the state of our bodies and minds redounds not only to ourselves.