Firstly, big thanks and shout-out to OP for making this post, it's so rare to see posts like this. Secondly, as someone with type 2 who has spent a lot of time having to correct the truly aggravating amount of misinformation about type 2 among acquaintances since being diagnosed, I'd like to pop on a quick* addition.
(Please take everything here with the understanding that it includes a huge amount of generalization/oversimplification as I am not an endocrinologist, just a reasonably scientifically-literate person with a lot of personal experience and some very good diabetes educators on her medical team)
What I think is crucial to understand about type 2 is that while there is some degree of correlation between type 2 diabetes and weight... the public (mis)conception about that correlation gets the causative relationship wrong.
Being fat doesn't cause you to develop type 2 diabetes... but having type 2 diabetes can cause you to be fat.
The mechanism of type 2 as an illness is that (unlike type 1 where the body does not produce enough or any insulin) your body is unable to effectively use its insulin to make use of the glucose from the food you eat to turn that glucose into energy for your body to use. Consequently, since you aren't actually getting enough of the energy from the food you eat to power your body, your body thinks it's starving because it's not getting enough fuel no matter what (or how much) you eat.
And what is the body's response to starvation? It conserves energy however it can (think of it as "all power to life support," biologically speaking), and one way it does that is by storing as much fat as it can spare. That's a pretty important survival tool that comes free with your human evolution.
Is it surprising, then, that people with an illness that essentially results in the body not being able to get sufficient energy may also tend to have bigger bodies as a result? This is why it's incredibly difficult for type 2 diabetics to lose weight, also (leaving aside the fact that the growing medical consensus is that significant weight loss is not healthy or sustainable for 95% of people, which is a whole other conversation). For those of us with type 2, our bodies are, on a cellular level, regularly experiencing low-level starvation, even if we have access to plenty of healthy food. To lose weight for a type 2 diabetic is to be fighting against hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution that has prioritized retaining body fat as a survival strategy.
Yeah, people with type 2 are more likely than the population at large to be fat, but medically speaking? It's the diabetes causing us to have larger bodies, not our larger bodies causing the diabetes. It's easy for it to seem like we "did it to ourselves" because type 2 is a "silent" disease and people are often experiencing insulin resistance for years or even decades before they receive a diabetes diagnosis, so weight gain over time as a result of insulin resistance can easily appear to have "caused" the diabetes once a diagnosis is finally received, even though the developing diabetes was actually the cause of said weight gain in the first place.
But we live in a horrifically fatphobic society so I'm not surprised that the nuance gets lost.
*haha I have never been succinct in my life
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