An obese young man, weighing over 700 lbs., decided to see his doctor. The doctor inquired about his eating habits. The young man told him that he consumed 5000 calories every day and that he's actually increasing that figure by 500 calories a month so that in ten months he expects to be consuming 10,000 calories a day.
The doctor advised him that he was on a path to a stroke, heart attack, and/or diabetes and that the only way to improve his quality of life was to cut back on his calorie consumption. If he didn't he would surely die young.
The man was addicted to food, however, and very reluctant to give it up so he proposed a compromise. "How about if I just increase my intake at a rate of 450 calories a month instead of 500," he suggested, "so that ten months from now I'll only be eating 9500 calories every day."
The doctor replied that that was foolishly inadequate, that he had to do more than cut the rate of increase, he had to cut his base consumption back to about 1500 calories a day.
At this the young man grew angry. He called the doctor's proposal "extremist" and a fringe view in the medical community. He complained that the doctor was needlessly trying to deprive him of everything that made his life pleasurable. He insisted that the doctor's advice would kill him. He stomped out of the office declaring as he left that the doctor was "a lunatic."
And so the young man continued gorging himself until one day a year or so later he dropped over dead.
