Like with so many other things, the far-leftist social justice ideology has taken a notion that was originally reasonable and sane, and distorted it and taken it to an absolutely insane extreme. In particular, it has taken the original notion of "people should not be bullied, harassed nor made fun of for being overweight" to the completely insane and unscientific "being obese is normal and healthy, and it's just another completely normal body type, and anybody who says otherwise is a bigot who should be physically assaulted".
They treat obesity as if it were just another completely normal human body shape, like being tall, or short, or having a big nose. Something that's completely normal, natural and, essentially, something you are born with and don't have a choice about. And, most particularly, something that makes no difference with regards to your health.
No, being obese is not "normal" for the human body. It's not natural, and it most absolutely is not healthy.
Note that in this context when I use the term "natural" I'm simply referring to the optimal state that humans have evolved into over hundreds of millions of years. Not in the sense of "this is what nature/evolution/whatever intended", but in the sense of how our body has naturally evolved.
The bodies of many organism, including most tetrapods (which we are), naturally evolved during hundreds of millions of years with a fat storage system, as a survival mechanism. In other words, when the animal is able to consume more food than it needs that particular day, its body is able to store at least some of that extra food in its fatty tissues, as a sort of "emergency reserve" in the form of fat. Then, in times of food scarcity the organism is able to get extra energy to survive by extracting fat from those tissues, burning it and using that energy to keep metabolism running. (An animal, or a human, is not able to survive for very long without eating anything, merely burning stored fat, no matter how much of it it has stored, but it is able to survive for longer periods of time while eating less than it would need, with the body taking the extra energy it needs to survive from the fatty tissues in addition to the food.)
The thing is, we never evolved a limit to how much fat can be stored in the fatty tissues. For the mere reason that we never needed such a limit. For hundreds of millions of years there was never any sort of evolutionary pressure to favor some sort of limit, a cap to how much fat to store. This much, but no more.
For millions of years, we never needed such a limit. For the vast, vast majority of human existence we lived in environments where we had to be constantly exercising by necessity, and getting food with very low amounts of carbohydrates. The major sources of carbs were essentially berries and fruits, which humans may have occasionally been able to gather and eat. For millions of years humans walked and ran around every day for miles and miles, eating fresh unprocessed meat and perhaps some vegetables, fruits and berries. In this sense humans lived extremely healthy lives, and that's the life style that we evolved into, over hundreds of millions of years: Lots of exercise, very little carbs, when we occasionally got an extra serving of carbs (eg. in the form of berries), the body would convert it to fat and store it for later use, when food was more scarce.
Then, suddenly, evolutionarily speaking in the blink of an eye, something changed quite drastically: We invented agriculture. We invented farming and cultivation. Suddenly, rather than having to be constantly on the move, being hunter-gatherers, we could settle down and start cultivating our own food. Carb-rich food, like wheat. Tons and tons of it.
For thousands of years it was still not bad. After all, agriculture is very hard physical work. And crop yields were very subject to bad weather conditions and bad years.
But over the millenia we got better and better at it. In fact, we got so good at it that it allowed small villages to grow into megacities. Over time these megacities could grow to have even millions of inhabitants. We became so proficient at agriculture and farming that a small fraction of the population could essentially feed millions of people.
Quite soon our food became richer and richer in carbohydrates, and poorer and poorer in other nutritional values. Suddenly we could feed millions of people with wheat products containing humongous amounts of carbs. We quickly invented ways to actually extract pure carbs from plants. Pure refined sugar is like a super-fuel for our body. Our body evolved during hundreds of millions of years to crave carbs, and we never evolved a limit to it. We are essentially addicted to carbs, and always want more of it.
And with excess carbs comes excess fat storage. And, as mentioned, we never evolved an upper limit to how much fat will be stored. There literally is no limit. The body will store as much fat as you throw at it, no matter how much it is, until it bursts at the seams. There literally is no upper limit.
Problem is, our body was never "designed" (in a manner of speaking) to handle this much excess fat. It never needed to, during millions of years. There has never been evolutionary pressure guiding the human body to handle that much extra fat properly.
As a result, the body starts getting all kinds of negative side effects when it gets too many carbs and stores way too much fat for way too long periods of time. All kinds of negative health effects start cropping up. The circulatory system can't handle it, the different organs can't handle it for too long. They get too much to do, which they were never "designed" (in a manner of speaking) to do. So they start failing to do their job properly, and as a consequence the body starts exhibiting all kinds of negative health effects, and if it continues for long enough, it will be crippling and even fatal.
So no, obesity is not "normal" nor "natural". It's a side-effect of our evolutionary past. It's caused by the lack of an upper limit that we never needed in the past, even though today it would benefit us, but which we just cannot get in such a blink of an eye, no matter how much evolutionary pressure there would be to get it. Obesity is, in essence, not much different from getting slowly poisoned by something that our bodies can't handle.
The most "normal" and "natural" lifestyle for our bodies is large amounts of daily exercise and a low-carb diet consisting mostly of plants and unprocessed meat. Refined sugar is a killer.
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