I sympathize with how hard it is to lose weight, but at some point personal responsibility kicks in right?

When you're that obese you're well beyond personal responsibility. Personal responsibility is enjoying a big thanksgiving dinner and then eating light for the next week or so, or eating some salads for a bit to have a hot girl summer. Obesity is increasingly looking more like a hormone disorder (the latest "miracle" weight loss drugs are all hormone-regulating) or an eating disorder of some sort and should be addressed as such.

Personal responsibility is great, but we're all paying for patients with type-2 diabetes (and other lifestyle related chronic conditions). We pay in terms of higher taxes for Medicare/Medicaid, higher premiums for private commercial insurance, and higher charges from providers trying to cover losses from indigent patients who default on medical debt. People are unlikely to suddenly become more responsible so what is your solution?

The optimal amount of helping hands and second chances are greater than zero.

There's this thing called "the Internet" now. You can find out all sorts of cool stuff on it.

Statistically, if a person is so obese for so long they get T2D, they are not going to go into remission just from googling weight loss or following whatever they find on the internet (doubly so if they fall into some crank Liver King style nonsense). That's just the facts. It's been studied over and over again for many years at this point.

I honestly don't understand responses like this. We're presented with systemic issues, and your "solution" is just "personal responsibility"? Something which has demonstrably failed and lead us to the situation we're in today? Do you often think that doing more of the same thing will lead to different results?

Since we're in a technology forum. Let's say you're a product owner and your app is suffering from severe performance issues. Would a "solution" of telling the developers of the app "just write code more efficiently! Use Google if you have to!" be acceptable to you? Do you think it would produce the results you want?

I think a better analogy to use would be a very slow loading app.

Say your app takes 5 minutes to load the first page and 1 minute to switch between pages after that. Instead of blaming the developers, blame the users for expecting too much of the app. Personal responsibility and all that.

It's the users fault they are using the app during peak times. If they really needed access to X part of the app they should have done it before it got busy.

I used the app dev side because I think it's more illustrative. There are various teams with various competing priorities who have collectively developed a product which is horribly slow. No individual developer is at fault. Some are efficient with their code, and some are less so. But there is no architecture team or mature SDLC to handle cross cutting concerns or a foundational platform for everyone to build from. Everyone is free to do their own thing and write code the way they want use whatever standards they can find on Google. In that world, just telling the devs to write more efficient code is insufficient to correct the course. The systemic problems that have developed require systemic solutions. A blanket "just do better" has never been useful to anyone.

It is entirely down to personal responsibility.

If you're morbidly obese, it is because you chose to eat too much and you chose to exercise too little.

It was your choice to stuff all that food in your face, no-one else's. You did it.

And your "solution" is completely meaningless because it's been proven to not work across societies. It's like saying the solution to world hunger is easy. Everyone should just feed themselves! Want world peace? Everyone should just be more peaceful! It's completely useless rhetoric with absolutely no value in the conversation. Are you actually incapable of looking at these things as systems with a large number of variables and broad societal impact?

Your analogy breaks down.

People are hungry across the world because there is a lack of food. They cannot just decide to feed themselves food that does not exist.

Terminally online cryptobros who get triggered by comments like "It was your choice to stuff all that food in your face, no-one else's" are not suffering from a lack of food, they are suffering from an excess of sugary poor-quality food. You decided to stuff that fourth twinkie in your face hole, you fat fuck. You can also decide to *stop* stuffing them in there.

Not you *you* obviously, the rhetorical you.

They use the internet and find people who tell them that it's not their fault. It's the fault of vegetables for being so expensive, even though vegetables are cheaper than junkfood. It's the fault of food deserts, even though they live in walking/driving range of half a dozen full-sized super markets. It's the fault of their genes, even all 8 of their great grandparents were fit. It's anybody/anything's fault, except their own. And so they stay fat, and join the ranks of those who perpetuate these fat-excusing myths (on full display throughout this discussion section.)