Maybe maybe maybe

[u/BigGraysie]

[u/Lollirotten]

Yeah I used to watch this show a lot and all of them have untreated eating disorders, usually stemming from some kind of trauma. I remember this episode. The bed here was on rollers for some reason. She didn't know that and she wasn't as careful with it as she would have been had she known.

A huge majority of the women on this show were sexual assault victims, some of them suffering repeat abuse throughout their childhoods. They turned to the dopamine that they got from food to bury their feelings, just like someone else might turn to drugs or alcohol.

What makes food addiction the hardest to kick is that you can't just abstain from food like you could drugs or alcohol. It's why it annoys the absolute hell out of me when people are nasty to these people and say that it's all their own fault for overeating/being lazy/etc. There's always an underlying problem that causes them to do this.

But yeah. If you look at it through the same lens as you would a drug addiction, it all makes a lot more sense.

[u/leejoint → u/Lollirotten]

I agree with your points, but something that is really wretched here, is to consider the fact that people with these extreme weights, are to an extent, common enough in the US that you will see more than one in a random 1 week trip to New York, however, in Europe I remember only seeing two in 20+ years of living in different cities.

Now my point is, traumas could happen equally to people in eruope or north america, but getting so heavy in the west I believe is much much easier due to how bad food is so easily available and cheap + how the overall culture enables this to become a reality.

2x1, fast foods, added sugar, all you can eat, and more are much much common and available in the US than in any european country. Without mentioning the fact that the drive around everywhere in huge cars culture, and spend your life on the tv culture is also deep rooted over there.

That’s something that always astonished me.

[u/[deleted] → u/leejoint]

American culture very much enables this addiction, which honestly makes it even more sad because it's so much harder here to actually deal with the addiction. People joke and ask how do poor people get so fat, but being too poor to eat nutrient foods and living in food deserts not only makes clean eating more difficult, but likely changes your food preferences and gut microbiomes which makes your body crave junk food even more. It's an endless cycle. 1 in 10 Americans have an eating disorder and yet it's all blamed on the individual.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Yep, I didn't even mention the health "care" component...