I can see these costs in my own family.
It has become apparent that my mother and her husband (in their 50s) are addicted to food. It is destroying their lives. Just in the past 12-18 months, they have packed on about 75-100lbs each. My mother going from overweight to morbidly obese and him going from already morbidly obese to class 900 or whatever morbidly obese.
Her husband has already had two heart attacks. He has a serious form of cancer. My sister said she visited with them recently and he couldn't walk more than short distances without becoming winded. Not only did he look like he gained weight since last visit, but also his hands looked extremely swollen, probably a sign of congestive heart failure. My mother does not like to talk about his health until he is literally in the hospital and she can't keep it from us anymore, so who knows what else is wrong with him, but I doubt it isn't costing a fortune. My sister noted that my mother was also continuing to balloon up and it was extremely concerning.
During this visit, they all went to a restaurant. My sister and BIL were absolutely appalled by the masses of food they were eating. They ordered appetizers for the table, but then ate the vast majority of those appetizers themselves. They then ordered probably the greasiest, calorie bomb items on the menu for entrees and then scoffed at my sister when she ordered from the reduced calorie menu saying she needed to live a little. They vacuumed that down and then insisted on dessert, despite this only being lunch and having ate all the food prior to this. On the way out, the two of them discussed what was going to be for dinner that night. Then my mother had the gall to complain about being fat. It was absolutely a complete WTF scenario.
They get very defensive if you bring up weight loss and insist they have no interest in change because it is their lives, if they want to eat themselves to death, so what? Her husband justifies it by saying even if he does lose the weight, he would probably die anyway from bad heart or cancer, so why take away this little bit of sunshine in his life? But being so obese is already compromising his already poor health severely. My mother is too old to continue packing on this kind of weight with no very serious consequences. She has already had obesity related gallbladder problems. My sister said of this past visit that she honestly does not see him living 10 years, maybe 5 if he is lucky at this rate. He just looks terrible. And she just keeps getting fatter and more and more insecure with it, taking it out in bizarre, passive aggressive ways on us.
Losing weight is not impossible. I myself was morbidly obese. However, I woke up to how I was wasting away my life being fat and lost an embarrassing amount of weight. My BMI is now normal and I work hard every day to keep it that way. A lot of my bloodwork improved markedly since I lost the weight and my physical stamina is way better than what it used to be. It sucks often to not be able to eat all the foods, but I just can't see going back to being the grossly overweight person I was before. No food is worth that. The key to losing weight is simply to eat less. Exercise isn't even necessary as long as you are eating below your sedentary TDEE. Anyone can do it, but not everyone is committed to doing it.
