As someone who has been both obese (as a child even), and underweight (as a stupid teenager), and is now what most people would consider "buff".

Fatness is a simple matter of putting in the work. You have to work hard to gain weight. Eating that much isn't easy (to gain fat). And lifting that much isn't easy either (to gain muscle). And you have to work hard to lose weight.

Yes, biology and genetics play into it. But they only affect your slope, not the end result.

If it took you ten years of consistently bad eating to become fat. Why would you expect it to take less than ten years of consistently good eating to lose the fat?

And yes, it is very discouraging when you naturally have a slow slope. It's not meant to be easy. If it were easy we'd all look like Schwarzenegger in his prime.

edit: my girlfriend likes to complain that "this stuff is easy for you", but she forgets the fact that I haven't had a rest day in 5+ years, and haven't had a cheat day in 2+ years.

Comments like this are myopic. This is reflective of your experience. For some people, eating enough to "gain fat" is easy -- in fact, it's effortless. For some people, outputting the energy to make CalsOut > CalsIn true is easy, also almost effortless. Both types of people exist in fitness-ignorant circles, eating the same foods their counterparts eat, usually in similar portions.

I believe it is sufficiently proven that it's not that people don't want to be at healthy weights (barring a handful of online extremists), it's that "the slope", as you refer to it here, is prohibitively difficult for the vast majority of people to overcome. That difficulty has to be broken down (and I personally believe fixing the issues in our food supply is a very important part of that -- it's almost impossible to buy healthy food in the US without going to a specialty grocer, no matter how hard you try). There are many ways to approach the problem, but right now the primary effort seems to be on just yelling at people to try harder. That works in some cases, but not nearly enough to be the only solution we have.

The discord on this topic originates from perspectives like this, where someone takes their personal experience and extrapolates it onto the rest of the population. It's great that you got fit, and it's great to encourage others to get fit too. It's not great to trivialize the complexity of the realities that contribute to the obesity epidemic. "Everyone else is a just a fat, lazy glutton", the crux of the fitness camp's argument, is popular because it's self-flattering and an effective marketing technique, but it's an extremely naive and superficial perspective on a global health epidemic, and it isn't going to motivate a great deal of progress on the issue.

I agree with you completely. The slope is prohibitively difficult for a lot if not most people.

And the food industry definitely needs to change to make it easier for people to affect their slope.

And regardless of all of that, I would rather tell people that this is hard and that it requires a lot of work and effort on their part, than to encourage them to give up after quickfix solutions don't work.

Ultimately it's about patience. If you do something, anything, every day (even going for a 10 minute walk is better than nothing). And if you are even remotely careful about what you eat, you will see results. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But if you keep it up for a few years, results will appear out of nowhere. And this stuff gives you compounding returns. The longer you do it, the quicker the returns on any new thing that you try.

When it comes to people you love, would you rather tell them that they are helpless victims, or that they can overcome their problems?

Here's a question for you: if we agree that being good at your career takes daily effort and practice for the majority of life, why does this conviction fall apart when it comes to diet and exercise? Why do we assume someone else should take care of that, not us? That it should somehow come as if by magic? It's a skill. You have to practice it to get better.

The relevant difference here is that we have much more clarity around career-oriented programs and we're able to keep the slope under control. Most people can find and establish a reasonable career for themselves. We use a lot of economic tools to make it so it's possible to break into a trade or career, including university, etc., and these programs have been successful in keeping "the slope" semi-reasonable. This has not happened with obesity. We've allowed the food conglomerates to run roughshod over American health in the name of greater sales.

(There is also the difference that it's a lot harder to justify extreme effort expenditure on the tasks necessary for daily biological maintenance, like eating.)

If something is impossibly hard for most people, the answer isn't to scream until the populace does the hard thing, the answer is to try to figure out a better path. You've surely heard the expression "work smarter, not harder".

Taken to its extreme, your logic disavows practically all tools of human invention. "Why would you expect to be able to dig a hole without weeks of labor, clawing away at the dirt? The ground didn't get there overnight and it's not going to go away overnight." We could use a manual shovel and reduce the effort investment by an order of magnitude, or a construction machine like a front shovel or auger and reduce the effort investment by (at least) another order of magnitude.

"Just try harder" is essentially just telling everyone else to claw at the dirt with their hands. There may be a handful of people with just the right combination of determination and imperviousness to self-harm to do this to get a hole, but the vast majority are going to give up early, and it's the same way with the obesity epidemic. It's not about "getting something else to do the work" (again, I think one of the root problems is our supply chain, something most Americans have little to no control over). It's simply about finding a solution that works for the 80%+ of American adults that don't get "the recommended amount" of daily exercise (to the extent which some of these people are non-obese, it's mostly a biological accident (one that is liable to break as they age)) and buy their food from the normal grocery store.

We need to see it as the macro problem it is instead of making a collective assault on the character of the people who can't do it. That may have been an OK solution for the first few years, but it should now be apparent that it simply doesn't work. The trend keeps getting worse. I understand it's hard to let go of that perspective since part of the appeal of fitness for many is the superiority complex, but it's not doing us any favors. We need to let it go and focus on finding a real solution, whether that's returning to a normal food supply, utilizing pharmaceuticals intelligently, redesigning our working lives to include more requisite and natural calorie-burning activity, or something else, we need to find an answer that works and stop clawing at the dirt.

> if we agree that being good at your career takes daily effort and practice for the majority of life, why does this conviction fall apart when it comes to diet and exercise?

This is how I put diet and exercise into perspective now. If I told someone I wanted to learn how to paint or play guitar and I started complaining in 2-3 weeks about how I'm seeing no progress, they would immediately be able to see how unrealistic I was with my initial expectations. Diet and exercise are no different.

Yep, people vastly oversimplify the issue. There's a meme that people are fat because they inhale 14 candy bars each day, but in reality, some (many) people are fat without doing that. I won't deny that that's sometimes the problem, but it's probably rarer than you think.

Weight gain induced by medical regimens can be really hard to put off, and YES, this is something that happens (it's not ultra-rare as fitness extremists want you to believe). People's bodies react differently to the heavily-processed, specifically-engineered food we have. It is true that most people can regulate their weight with enough effort, but the amount of effort required seems to fluctuate greatly based on hereditary factors.

This doesn't even mention that in America, it's almost impossible to find food that isn't packed with junky addictive substances. It's pretty likely that normal people who are consciously forgoing the "candy" in attempt to stay healthier are getting practically the same amount of junk calories from bastardizations of "healthy" foods, like "natural whole wheat" bread that contains brown sugar or "maple syrup" that is actually just HFCS, water, and dye.

The issue of obesity is much more complicated than a lot of people want the populace to believe. Identifying the motives behind the perpetuation of this confusion is left as an exercise for the reader.

I believe the issue is caused by the technology we have (along several fronts, including but not limited to the sedentary lifestyles promoted by office work, and the way we manufacture foods today, which does not agree with the biological makeup of many in the population) and I believe there is a technological solution to it out there somewhere. Cheers to the MIT team for looking into this and not just sticking their head in the sand.

It's made worse by the fact that when people give up on losing weight (and most people that fail to do so eventually will give up), they tend to give up by giving in to their own stereotype - eating buckets of fried chicken and guzzling soda. They've created a scarcity reaction in themselves by avoiding all the unhealthy crap that is out of proportion to the actual hardship involved - psychology is a messy business.

So then people see them indulging themselves and think "No wonder he's so fat, look what he eats", and confirmation bias gives them a nice hug.

There is at least one fundamental truth: obesity is on the rise. Why?

I think it is safe to assume that a rapid change in the human genome is not responsible for skyrocketing obesity rates around the world. From what I have read it seems that dietary shifts towards more processed and simple-carbohydrate rich food are the main culprit. Increasingly sedentary lifestyles are accomplices.

These effects are on a statistical and societal level. Also, they don't imply that and individual can just change their diet and easily loose weight. It is possible once someone gains weight their body irreversibly changes so that losing weight becomes much more difficult (I mean irreversible to imply hysteresis, not impossibility).

That direction of thought has produced quite a few useful insights, and continues to drive significant research. I'd never call it a 'fundamental truth' though - it's a question, and a type of question which allows for many interacting answers, none of which may be fundamental. In particular, it can be extremely difficult to trace the links between societal (non-physical) changes and the mechanisms by which they affect the physical.

We are eating more sugars - is that because more sugars are supplied, because we can afford more sugars, because sugars are snuck into all our foods, or because we like sugars more than we used to?

We are moving around less - is that because we have more sedentary jobs, because we have less physical labor to do at home, because the interesting hobbies that don't involve moving around are expanding, or because some quirk of the childrearing techniques in the 70s had significant impact on our interest in athletics?

You see how complicated these things get when you start talking about 'fundamental' causes and reasons.

Myself, I've got a choice. Either I'm at a constant weight and I'm stupid due to low blood sugar, or I end up gaining weight. It's incredibly hard for me to find the right balance, I haven't managed it yet.

My body's response to caloric restriction defies the math behind all the weight loss calculators I've seen. I don't even know how it's physically possible. Which sucks, because I find it fairly easy to limit my calorie intake, but have to eat at nearly concentration-camp levels to drop weight, which isn't fun.

However, my body responds very well to exercise, especially strength training. Less convenient (takes time, space, maybe some equipment) but, conversely, works way better for me than any tables/calculators I've seen say it should. You might try that, if you haven't.

Have you tried a ketogenic diet (low carb)?

What helped me was a a low-carb diet. After two weeks, cravings for sweets were gone and I felt great.

Funny that you mention it, because I do have a punch-line that I tell obese people - it goes like this: "Eat little, fuck a lot". This is really just Occam's razor. Most people would feel better, if they would eat thoughtfully and do physically activities that they enjoy.

btw.: I was the fattest, weakest kid in high-school and after a decade of hard workouts and a strict diet, I can probably beat up most other guys and I also look better.

Every thin person in the country? That's a little broad don't you think? We're not talking in absolutes here, but if every obese person in the country ate and worked like their thin counterparts people do we'd have much less of a weight problem. Plus, then we'd find out who the people are with real problems.

I personally see thin people buying the same stuff obese people buy all the time. I see thin people at fast food places and sit-down restaurants (which are usually not substantially healthier). I've seen families that live off the same food supply and one person is obese while others are thin. You can argue "the thin people must only buy those foods or go to those places sparingly", but we all know that's not really generally true either.

There is so much variation that it's hard to generalize this, but the sentiment you've expressed is a big part of the reason we can't get anywhere. People's bodies react to food differently. Obesity is not always caused by a lack of inhibition. We need to stop detesting obese people before there can be a serious solution that curbs the growing obesity trend. If "diet and exercise" were tenable solutions, we'd be seeing steadily declining obesity rates; instead, the rates continue to skyrocket worldwide (in conjunction with modernization of country's food supply, suggesting that modern processing "contaminates" food with substances that promote obesity). We need a better answer.

It was obvious hyperbole, directed at the poster I was responding to, a fairly typical speech pattern. Did you actually get the impression I was trying to suggest that literally every thin person in the country thinks in the same way?

But you clearly missed my point. Eating is a cause and an effect. If every obese person in the country ate exactly like 'the thin people do' (by which I assume you mean the same foods and quantities) then yeah, most of them wouldn't be obese. That is exactly the kind of 'simple statement' I was talking about.

If all of the stupid people in the country learned the same things the smart people do, we'd be in much better shape educationally too.

Anybody can eat anything (allergies aside). Stupid people can't just learn the same things as smart people.

Largely untrue on one count or the other. You are being vague about the word 'can'.

Someone with a low IQ 'can' learn almost all of the same things as someone with a high IQ, it just takes more effort and time. We are hindered in our discussion because we have no word to describe the analogous 'propensity toward obesity' for which we have significant evidence.