This is a much needed perspective. The connection between mental health and obesity cannot be overstated. Here's one of the things I read that really opened my eyes on this and proved to me that it's much more than just an issue of education or discipline - it's an excerpt about a study in which morbidly obese patients underwent medically supervised fasting to rapidly lose weight, with broad initial success:

The people who did best, and lost the most weight, were often thrown into a brutal depression, or panic, or rage. Some of them became suicidal. Without their bulk, they felt they couldn’t cope. They felt unbelievably vulnerable. They often fled the program, gorged on fast food, and put their weight back on very fast.

[The doctor] began to ask all his patients these three simple questions. How did you feel when you lost weight? When in your life did you start to put on weight? What else happened around that time? As he spoke to the 183 people on the program, he started to notice some patterns. One woman started to rapidly put on weight when she was twenty-three. What happened then? She was raped. She looked at the ground after she confessed this, and said softly: “Overweight is overlooked, and that’s the way I need to be.”

When five of his colleagues came in to conduct further interviews, it turned out some 55 percent of the patients in the program had been sexually abused—far more than people in the wider population. And even more, including most of the men, had had severely traumatic childhoods.

Trauma is deeply connected to mental illness, to physical health, to obesity.