Ultimately, such a feature could (should?) be reserved for a more "realistic" mode, but I don't see this as judgmental any more than...
Starvation/malnutrition resulting in a slimmer character.
Sleep deprivation causing a character to appear haggard.
Poison/disease crippling a character and/or rendering them visibly ill.
Certain moral/ethical choices shifting a character's Alignment.
These are all instances of a character suffering the consequences of an adventuring lifestyle.
Yes, but none of them are associated with real life prejudices that have a proven negative impact on people’s real lives, as there’s a mounting body of evidence that fatphobia does. I think it would be totally inappropriate for BG3 to implement features that would reinforce harmful stereotypes about fat people, and any feature like the one you suggest would have to be done extremely carefully to avoid that, and definitely not in a way that singles out fatness for special treatment.
To explain a bit further, while it might be the case that on average fat people are less active than thinner ones, it would be stereotyping to jump from that generalisation to assume of a specific fat person that they’re not active, or that every fat person is inactive, which is uncomfortably close to the harmful stereotyping of fat people as lazy. We’ve already seen counterexamples to that in this thread, and there’s absolutely no reason to assume that anyone’s custom character should be average either (just as the fact that women are on average not as strong as men shouldn’t mean that I’m prevented from creating a strong female warrior who bucks that trend). But it feels as though the feature you suggest relies for its “realism” on that stereotype of fat people being inactive, as the only reason they’d lose weight in the course of the adventure is if they were more active or ate less, and while it’s possible that would be the case depending on our character’s backstory, we’re given no specific in-game reason to believe it must be so, and the game is neither forcing us to move vast distances in a day nor giving us reason to believe food is scarce.
That’s probably about as much as it’s appropriate to say here without venturing too far into sensitive real world topics, so I would just recommend that any further discussion on this point keeps in mind that this is a subject that does have a bearing on folk’s everyday experiences and that we should be alive to that when discussing the topic in an open forum.
