Seriously, how is anyone dumb enough to be fat?

[Clueless Morgan]

Easiest way not to get fat? Eat what you want, eat it slowly and enjoy every mouthful, then stop eating as soon as you're full. That's eat. Eat pizza, chips, burgers, curries, cakes, cookies, Chinese food, whatever you want. Just stop when full. Simple as that.
Except it's not really as simple as it sounds when we're all brainwashed when it comes to food. Adverts for unhealthy foods all over the place, more adverts for diets which shame you for even looking at the other adverts. Then you might have been shamed into clearing your plate at meal times by parents who wouldn't let you leave the table until you'd finished your dinner, or told you you were somehow disrespecting starving children in Africa by not eating all your food. As a result of all this people can easily develop a tendency to eat past the point when they are full. Especially when it's something unhealthy and your obsession with good food vs bad food causes you to binge and possibly eat a whole pizza when you were actually full after the first slice. A bulemic person would purge after such a binge, but others will just sit there feeling guilty and wonder why they did it, or even come up with excuses for it.

While I agree with the sentiment of eating what you want and stopping when you're full, I don't think hunger and the drive to eat actually works that way, and it's definitely not just advertisers making us want to eat sugary, fatty, unhealthy food. There's also an aspect of what we have evolved eating and what our bodies reward us for eating. Sugar and fatty foods often have higher calories, but were also harder to get or more scarce when we were hunter/gatherers, and those foods tend to be food we crave to eat: sweet, sugary, fatty, savory.

We also don't have a well developed sense of when to stop eating. Our bodies reward us for eating, and unfortunately it rewards us for eating things that aren't that great for us to be eating all the time.

With that said, there's definitely an aspect of commercializing food that's pretty awful in that many really unhealthy foods are cheap and healthy foods are expensive so families on a budget often have to sacrifice health and nutrition for the sake of saving money or getting the best bang for the buck.

You have a law requiring calories are printed on restaurant menus? Where do you live? Nannystate central?

Why is this "nannystating?" I don't mind knowing how many calories are in the food I'm eating and it can help people make better choices by simply giving them the information. If they don't care about calories they'll ignore it, if they do they'll appreciate it.

Giving information isn't being a nannystate - what's being a nannystate is legislating the maximum drink size. Now that's some bullshit right there.

I'm all for giving people the information regarding caloric intake of what they eat and drink* but it's crossing a line to force a thing like drink sizes on them. Let people make their own bad choices, all that means is that they'll learn more from that choice when they see the consequences.

* A major pet peeve of mine is Nutrition Information boxes on foods and drinks. I think it should be a requirement, especially with drinks, that the Nutrition Information be given for the bottle, as well as the serving size, not just for a serving size and then tell you that there's actually three servings in the bottle knowing full well that the person is going to sit there and drink the whole thing. I think it's hugely misleading for them to do it by serving size only. I think this could easily be extended to all foods where Nutrition Information is required as part of their packaging.