There's a huge industry designed to sell the idea that losing weight is quick and easy if you just spend money. That's not the same thing.

There are effective weight loss coaches but since you already know their advice (which is that you need to permanently commit to regular exercise and you need to take permanent control your energy balance in order to sustain a target weight), and since their advice requires discipline to follow, they're somehow not as popular.

I think being obese is as much a choice as being poor is a choice: you're born into it and have obese friends who feedback into an inactive lifestyle. Escaping obesity is possible with hard work, as is escaping poverty, but its also not easy. That said, counting calories isn't that hard, but it does take discipline, and that's not easy.

>That said, counting calories isn't that hard, but it does take discipline, and that's not easy.

Several studies have shown that we're not good in discipline at all, unless for people that it's innate. So discipline might be a factor out of our control too (genetic), and it's just the presence of people with more innate discipline (against genetic) that makes it achievable.

Yea that doesn't surprise me, though studies also say that we're strongly influenced by our peers and are largely creatures of habit, so there are definitely tricks around this like hanging out with others into fitness or even lurking on a fitness subreddit.