Fat People Are Normal

Being fat is unhealthy, means you are less attractive, often despised by society, certainly treated more poorly at work, and contributes to depression.  All of these result in most fat people experiencing the iconic American condition, low self-esteem.  Taking no other factors into account it is better to not be fat.

However, we are human beings who evolved in Africa tens of thousands of years ago in a very different environment.  Some of the things we needed were very rare, sugars, salt, fats.  You may ask about fats, but animals that need to run away from predators have low fat content, far lower than domesticated animals that have been bred over thousands of years.  As a result of the scarcity of these rare foods humans (or actually many mammals far predating humans) developed a mechanism for preferring these foods over others, namely taste.  Sugar, salt, and fat are tastier than pretty much anything else to pretty much all humans.

The basic desires of humans for fat, sugar, and salt has not changed much since those times, but our ability to produce them has dramatically changed, they are ubiquitous and cheap.  The natural preference of humans and the availability of fat, sugar, and salt means that the natural state of the modern human is to eat lots of fat, sugar, and salt.  It's just how we are put together.

Why aren't all rich humans fat?  There is a contrary preference in humans, that being attraction.  Like all animals human beings have preferences for mates with qualities that can be passed on to offspring that will help them to survive.  In the circumstances of our evolution being athletic, and therefore not fat, could be a life or death attribute.  This is somewhat offset by fat being necessary to survive periods without food, which is why rail thin people are not as attractive as slightly meatier people.  For those who think this is not true and that fashion models are the epitome of attractive simply look at which women men look at in the media, and it isn't skinny.

So we have two competing natural human urges, the personal urge to eat lots of fat, salt, and sugar whenever available, and the desire of other people for mates who are not fat.  In the modern world, in order to be attractive you must deny yourself another urge, and that urge is internal.  In order to be fat in the modern world you must deny yourself the urge to be attractive, and that urge is external.

Now, which is more "normal," denying an internal drive or an external drive?  At the minimum the internal drive is equally normal, and I would say more normal.  This pretty much explains the explosion of obesity everywhere that people can afford to be obese.  It is more natural as a human to be fat than not.  It's actually kind of weird to be skinny, it requires daily denial of the most basic desire of the human body.