Hmm. There’s a lot of study and documentation that points to the development of eating disorders, including binge eating, as a response to trauma (most specifically and what I’ve read the most about, as a response to sexual trauma like rape, abuse, molestration).

I don’t think every obese person has that experience as the driving cause for their obesity, but it’s one clear and significant example where obesity is not simple, not truly caused by hunger, and not really the result of having no control — at least, not the result of having no control over a person’s appetite.

I also have observed personally children who are born into fat or obese families who are surrounded by gluttonous eating and who naturally follow the examples set before them. This happens before a child is old enough to understand calories, health, even really that “eating an excess of food leads to weight gain.” I don’t think that’s an unquenchable thirst or a lack of control; I think it’s a situation where children are truly doomed by their family before they can even start to manage their own health.

I’ve also read articles about things like emotional eating where a person eats to assuage their feelings and not their physical hunger.

I do agree that the solution to weight loss has much more to do with what a person eats than whether they eat at all; if you don’t eat you are in for a bad time and going to fail. However, it’s true that proper nutrition isn’t taught in schools and even the food pyramid put out by the US government, and other similar models or advice about what to eat from such sources, are very flawed and influenced by lobbies.