From an evolutionary standpoint, animals cycle from obese to slim year round. Obesity is normal in autumn. Being slim is normal in spring/early summer. Food state wise we are in a eternal autumn.
An animal who has a normal weight for one of its species at some time of year is not obese.
Also, the life expectancy of humans is >10x a bear.
Why are people bending over backwards to normalize diabetes and obesity?
The weeds in a garden need to be pulled or they will take the garden. Problems need to be recognized and then fixed, anything else is delusion.
Bears are an example that shows very clearly it's normal for animals in nature to become very much "not lean" to survive, and the drive to put on fat stores is probably much broader in nature than animals that hibernate to survive winter.
What's unique about humans is that we've engineered our environment to the point that most of us no longer suffer long stretches of being unfed or underfed to strip the excess fat stores off of us.
Some people are clearly better than others at fighting the behavior evolution has programmed into them. It's not good for them today, but at the same time that drive for survival is what kept their ancestors alive.
My suggestion is to look at old black/white tribal photos of natives. They do not fullfill your beauty standards, but they lived normal sustenance lifes. And yes, the woman and men have bellies. Not huge ones, but noticeable ones. Same thing in the animal kingdom. The dominant monkey in a harem, besides the normal hormonal dominance meat-mountain bloat, usually has a belly. Our beauty standard is met by animals in distress, being pushed into marginal territories. Healthy is, somewhere in the middle, not on either side of the isles of madness.
Of course, everyone instinctively knows this even if they want to use mental gymnastics to explain why it is OK. Alcoholics, drug addicts, etc are defensive too and have many excuses at the ready for why their behavior is acceptable.
In the end, however, reality will hit hard and five dollar words aren’t going to save the obese and those with unhealthy lifestyles from sickness and early death.
I never understood why these references are being made regarding health.
Bears aren’t healthy. Bears don’t live long. Ancient people weren’t healthy, their diets weren’t healthy and they had lots of untreated issues as well.
I supose quite a few bears live quite long lives -- for being bears.
> Ancient people weren’t healthy, their diets weren’t healthy and they had lots of untreated issues as well.
As far as I've gathered from (pop-sci summaries of fairly recent-ish) research, people in prehistoric and pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies were on average at least as healty as -- and often healthier than -- people in later agricultural societies, from the Bronze and Iron Ages through antiquity, the Middle Ages and Renaissance, up until at least the early Modern Age and quite possibly through to our days of (relative, unequally-distributed) affluence and its concomitant recent global obesity.
Most primates including us humans are tropical and subtropical creatures, which didn't face classical winters until relatively recently. The Neanderthals did, for a considerable amount of time, and their physiology might have been different, but the Neanderthals were also developed enough to protect themselves using clothing and shelters, and possibly store food, so physiological adjustments might not have been necessary.
Modern humans are basically Africans adapted to ~ Kenyan climate, though. (Yeah I know about the Neanderthal and Denisovan admixture.)