When someone gains weight, fat, there’s a fairly broad number of ways it can deposit, mostly based on genetics. That basic pattern can end up being shifted by circumstances, so that someone that’s prone to being all belly, may end up with it in two sections rather than evenly distributed across the belly.
A lot of times, when I’ve seen this effect, it’s usually someone that gained weight rapidly, often, but not always, after an illness or injury. They’d be prone to carrying excess fat growth around the abdomen to begin with, and by being sorta stuck in a chair or in bed, it ends up folding over at the hips, with it being accentuated by pants being worn low towards the beginning of the weight gain, so that there’s less expansion on the pubis than there otherwise might be.
Since its someone that’s still ambulatory, just not safely so, you can still see some of the leg muscles being present, but there is still some fat expansion there.
How weight is gained doesn’t have much to do with where the fat grows most, but it can influence other things, like skin health. And that’s where you’re probably picking up signs of illness subconsciously. The skin of the person in the image has a look I commonly associate with a range of endocrine disruption.
So you’re likely dead on that the human there is in the scooter because of an underlying health issue that also triggered rapid weight gain along with a decreased metabolism.
Also, while people love to pretend otherwise, if a person can’t, or has great trouble, stopping eating when they should, that’s actually a sign of an underlying problem, not some kind of personal failing. There’s a fairly complex set of reactions in the body that go from the process of eating to the brain, where the brain starts sending signals that it’s time to stop.
Anything that interferes with that process can make so you never feel full, or always feel hungry. It can cause delayed satiation, where you don’t feel full until well after your body has taken in what it needs. And it isn’t just endocrine issues that can make it happen. I’ve seen it after strokes and TBI. I’ve seen it post surgery, usually cardiac or abdominal. Medications can throw things off, autoimmune disorders, it’s a laundry list.
Since many of those issues lead to at least temporary reduction in mobility, even if the whole chain was working normally, there’d still be problems because it takes the brain and body time to adapt to a lower energy use state. Satiety very often lags behind a change by weeks or months. Then, since the body is healing, it’s screaming for more resources anyway.
Nothing about weight gain or loss is in isolation. It’s a systemic malfunction.
I’m always disgusted by how badly people pronounce Illinois.
It’s ill-in-wah ffs