Fat can be a good thing, and is something I certainly wish I had more of, but I can't fathom how someone could eat themselves to the point that they have to have their legs amputated because of diabetes.
In the context of your wider aversion to obesity in general, invoking an argument like this is fallacious. What you're trying to say, I gather, is that losing limbs is a bad thing and fat people are foolish for risking it. The assumption of losing limbs being a bad thing is pretty uncontroversial, since limbs are crucial for most people's practical lives, preferred lifestyle, and material ambitions. But the assumption that fat people are foolish for risking the loss of their limbs is faulty in the following ways:
First of all, most fat people never lose their legs, or even one leg. I couldn't easily find a reliable statistic as to how many diabetic amputees there are in the country, but the number is orders of magnitude below the number of fat people in America. Thus, the risk that you have implied is exceedingly low. The vast majority of fat people have both of their legs, and the vast majority of those will always have them.
Second of all, limb loss due to diabetes is not directly the result of being fat. Indeed, there are plenty of diabetics who aren't fat at all. Limb loss is the direct result of either poor diabetes management or severe medical complications resulting from diabetes. Being fat may elevate someone into a position of risk--and I say "may" because the evidence in support of the claim that obesity itself directly causes diabetes is surprisingly low--but whether that risk ever produces an actuality is much more dependent on people's dietary and exercise habits than on their waistlines.
Third of all, as I mentioned, obesity--or, more precisely, adipose tissue itself--is not actually known definitively to be a cause of diabetes. You will find this to be true of almost every disease for which obesity is blamed. The correlations are irrefutable, but actual causation is still a question mark. "Obesity is bad" has become a modern religion: People believe it with all their hearts, but they've got no ground to stand on. Thought and I had a disagreement about this recently. His position was that we should infer causation because there is also no evidence to explicitly discount the possibility that fat itself causes these diseases, and the circumstantial evidence all points in favor of it. My position was that this may have some practical value inasmuch as being thinner (on the fear of health problems) would bring down one's health risks, but I went on to say that inexplicable solutions--even when they work--are not helpful from medical, intellectual, and in this case cultural standpoints. We are operating out of ignorance here. We've made body fat the villain, but I think body fat has been framed. The reason I think this is because we have gone to such incredible lengths to prove our suspicions that fatness causes all of these diseases, and have still yielded very little proof that this is actually the case. We've dug ourselves deeper and deeper into this mindset that obesity is the root of all evil. If we were right, we should have more to show for it by now. That we don't suggests to me that the mindset is wrong or at best incomplete. This is not semantics: If fatness itself is not so bad after all, then something else causes the diseases which correlate with fatness. That's a very important possibility for a species that loves to eat and stands little to lose from the shape and encumbrances of fat. (In other words, most people's practical lives, preferred lifestyle, and material ambitions are independent of how fat they are. For instance, as a writer I could weigh almost anything and still be able to pursue my ambition. When obesity is not inherently unhealthy, only people whose lives, tastes, or ambitions require exceptional athleticism cannot afford to be obese. Such people are a small minority.)
Fourth of all, it is a mistake to assume that people who get fat are doing so to be self-destructive. When you wrote that you "can't fathom how someone could eat themselves to the point that they have to have their legs amputated," you made an insinuation of deliberate intent. Effectively, you accused fat people of saying to themselves "I'm going to get so fat that I lose my legs. Nom nom nom!" That's not how people think. Well, admittedly, some folks do use obesity as an expression of self-destructiveness. However, I would zealously point out that this is true only because of the social stigma on being fat and the popular misconception that being fat will kill you, rather than because of any inherent property of fatness. In general, most people get fat simply because they like to eat and have food to spare. How much would you weigh if your family members weren't starving you? How much would I weigh if I could afford to buy whatever I wanted, all the time? How much would ZeaLitY weigh if he weren't hellbent on rocking the casbah with his muscles and stamina? A few people even get fat because they explicitly like being fat--and it is a testament to the power of human preference that such people would exist at all in a culture that treats fat people so horribly. Put it all into perspective, and you can see that folks usually have all kinds of reasons for getting fat, and only a few of these reasons are self-destructive. The premise that any act in the furtherance of obesity is self-destructive is but a credo of the religion of fat-bashing. It isn't true. On the contrary, it is quite easy to explain such acts without concluding that the person in question is trying to destroy themselves.
Fifth of all, and lastly, you are mistaken to insinuate that there is no value in acting outside the interests of one's long-term health. Your assumption--not mine, but yours--is that being fat is unhealthy. Going on that assumption, we get the insinuation I just described: People should not do anything to make themselves unhealthy or less long-lived. That's not a premise that I support. For that matter, it's not a premise that many people support. Health and even life take a second seat to the pursuit of one's ambitions. Right now, Sir Richard Branson is building a spaceship that might kill everybody onboard when it launches. But folks are still lining up, with hundreds of thousands of dollars in pocket, for tickets on the first flights. Why? They could greatly improve their odds of long life by staying firmly on the ground. And what about health? A friend of mine plays college basketball. He's stupendously fit, but the things he does to his body in the course of training and play are also incredibly hard on the skeleton and joints. Athletes face tremendous health problems later in life related to mobility. That's also true of anyone who does a lot of heavy lifting or high-impact exercise, from construction workers to soldiers. Do the risks of future health problems make it foolish for these people to be doing what they're doing? Perhaps you would argue that getting fat is not exactly equivalent to skiing or building a tower or defending the nation or seeing the curve of the Earth with your own eyes. Perhaps you would argue that these things merit the risk. Well, it's true that getting fat is certainly a lot
easier than any of these other things. But would it be less valuable or less meaningful to the point that risks are not justified? That's a matter of personal preference. I would say again, that's a matter of personal preference. Maybe in your case, given your preferences, you would never pursue such a course yourself. Maybe you would consider people who do pursue that course to be foolish. That's your prerogative, but where would it come from, and how justified would you be in holding it? Is obesity a destroyer, like religion? Is it a menace, like addiction? Is it a danger, like pollution? I just don't see a good argument for inherently holding obesity in contempt.
I suppose it would be helpful to distinguish between people who explicitly don't want to be fat, and everyone else. For those who don't want to be fat, it would obviously be a source of stress and a mark of failure for them to be fat. Perhaps it would make sense to hold these people in a different regard than we hold those who don't mind being fat or who enjoy it. We could immediately write the second group of people off as irrelevant to our discussion. Then we could contemplate with greater clarity the question of fat people who don't want to be fat.
What should we make of them? I'll tell you what I make of them: I sympathize with them. I know how hard it can be to have an ambition firmly in sight but to face such difficulty in achieving it. That's not foolishness or laziness or pettiness. It's just a part of life. Not all things come easily. Weight loss is one of them. The human body doesn't like to lose weight. We evolved to gain weight and hold onto it. We evolved to love food--especially fat and sugar. We even evolved to appreciate fatness in the human form. That's something that our culture presently lives in denial of, but it's no coincidence that male fat tends to exaggerate the male figure while female fat tends to exaggerate the female figure.
That is why these people should seek help, or have someone around to monitor their nutritional needs for them. There is a huge difference between thinking you're starving, and starving for real. I tend to have little patience for people who say they're starving, but have enough body fat to sustain them for a month.
You're confusing hunger, starvation, and caloric needs. People get hungry regardless of how thin or fat they are. Going without food for a month (or subsisting on a tiny diet) would be as difficult for a fat person as it would for you. In fact it would be harder for the fat person, because for them the diet would be more extreme: The human body needs a certain amount of calories to maintain its weight, and this need goes up as the human body itself grows in size. If you can maintain weight on 1000 calories a day, and a fat person can maintain weight on 3000 a day, a 600-calorie diet would be much more extreme for them than for you. Additionally, fat people usually have enlarged stomachs that require more food to reach a state of fullness.
However, even though it's not an entirely fair comparison, it's worth contemplating anyway just to appreciate the hardship of enduring hunger. When somebody's hungry, that's a bad thing. You know how tough hunger is. Now, as a part of weight loss, some hunger may be unavoidable, but to get to the point where you feel justified in having no patience for someone who is hungry on the grounds that they are fat, you would first have to pass the judgment that they need to lose weight. That's a judgment you would likely be out of bounds to make. People should each as much as they want to eat in accordance with their personal goals.
And on the topic of food, this is the first year I can remember being afraid that I won't survive the winter. I've complained enough about the actions of the people living here before, but now they've been allowed to take over the shopping list and menu. There is absolutely nothing on there that is beneficial to me, there are many things I've been told to avoid, and I got in trouble for trying to make additions. They will kill me if this keeps up for much longer.
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I think I can understand, though, why you might be feeling some extra enmity toward fat people right now. You're thin and apparently you're hungry much of the time. It'd be easy to look at a fat person and see comfort and ease, and to hold that against them. I guarantee you, however, Zephira, that, in this culture, a fat person's life is never one of purely comfort and ease. Fat people have to put up with all kinds of discrimination. Life can be very hard when you're a member of an oppressed class. Don't feel too resentful.
