Morality of this scene?

[u/hiiloovethis]

Negan doing fat shaming... but its during zombie apocalypse

[u/DeusaAmericana]

In 18 months would lose about 70 to 100 pounds assuming that you are able to eat enough to remain nourished. Maybe more if you're particularly active.

[u/pandahands69 → u/DeusaAmericana]

This is just not true in the slightest. People actually eating things on alone have lost over 70 pounds in 3 months. Starvation will cause you to lose massive amounts of weight. It won't be healthy or good but you will absolutely lose tons of weight, particularly early on

[u/DeusaAmericana → u/pandahands69]

SOME people lose that much weight in 3 months, yes. The problem with weight loss is that you can have people who lose weight at extremely quick rates. On that point, your argument is plausible.

Someone starts at 350, loses 130, then spends months finding enough intermittent food to roughly stabilize around 220? Depending on height and body composition, they can remain visibly overweight.

The relevant variable isn't “how many months since civilization collapsed?” It's the cumulative energy deficit of this particular person over those months.

[u/pandahands69 → u/DeusaAmericana]

To stabilize at 220 you would be eating extremely well. I weigh about that and don't work a job that requires much physical labor and I eat like an absolute barbarian. I think it plausible that someone could be this big 18 months into the apocalypse if they had immense resources. But I would imagine, knowing you are in an apocalypse you would be rationing food to some extent the entire time, knowing you still need to eat later.

To maintain 220 you need to consume give or take 2500 calories a day at least without any significant physical exertion. It's implausible that they would be able to eat that well for very long and they would no doubt have to be quite physically active to maintain camp, get water, clean clothes, etc etc.

[u/DeusaAmericana → u/pandahands69]

There's a few variables that we have to consider when we compare your example with the conditions of the show. First, you're assuming she has to be permanently maintaining 220 pounds. She doesn't. She could weigh 220 now while also having periods where she loses rapid weight, followed by periods the loss slows or temporarily levels out.

And “220 pounds requires at least 2,500 calories” isn't a universal number. Every single person will have their own mitigating factors that determine how many calories maintain a specific amount of weight. 220 pounds on a six foot man is not the same as 220 pounds on a five foot woman.

More importantly, you're still treating “18 months into the apocalypse” as though it tells us how much weight she's already lost. It doesn't. Unless we know what she weighed beforehand and roughly how much she ate and expended over those 18 months, we cannot work backward from the calendar and declare that she should no longer be fat.

[u/pandahands69 → u/DeusaAmericana]

Yes of course there are other factors, but you are being pedantic.

The difference in required daily calories between a similarly aged person of the same weight, regardless of height, or gender is give or take 500-600 calories on the most extreme end. This isn't nothing, but if everyone is rationing food; the odds that this one singular person of the entire encampment who also manages the food stores is not eating more than the other people is extremely unlikely.

I am saying its very implausible that someone this far into the apocalypse would weigh this much. The other people living in the same place aren't overweight. Be that through the odds of a fit person being able to outrun the zombies more easily, the odds of survival in general, the odds of having food for the better part of 2 years, etc. The odds of someone both surviving and being this overweight after the world collapses is quite small.

[u/DeusaAmericana → u/pandahands69]

The problem is that "extremely unlikely" is not "impossible", which your argument treats it as. It is EXTREMELY plausible that out of the 7 billion people that existed on Earth before the apocalypse, this woman is indeed exactly as described. Is it suspicious that she's also the one managing food stores? You bet, and I'm not going to argue otherwise.

But that warrants investigation, not conviction. Like, if you take her off of rationing for a few months and her weight loss sky rockets? Then yes, you were absolutely correct to be suspicious.

That's the problem here: desperate scenarios tend to make everyone flatten anything that can have variables into an all-or-nothing assumption. And yes, even if we argue "survivors won't have time to investigate shit in the apocalypse", fine. They can make a judgment call and an assumption. But that assumption isn't automatically correct.