> There is no panacea for weight loss - everyone is different.

You described the panacea: Eat less. If you eat less than you burn, you will lose weight. This effect is so predictable and reliable that taken to its logical conclusion it results in death. We call this starvation.

And everyone really isn’t different. The only thing different for most people is what sort of diet they find more tolerable. The fundamentals don’t change though.

Everyone really is different. Vastly different gut flora, vastly different neural connections in the brain, vastly different neural connections in the gut. In fact, the only things that are similar across bodies are their macroscopic qualities and those are arguably the least important.

None of that changes physics. It might change dietary compliance but that’s all.

This might be true in thermodynamic sense but it is a useless and trite statement.

It's like saying "people are in debt because they borrowed money" - true, but banal and trivial, and pretending it's the whole story and saying nothing of medical debt, student loans or living from paycheck to paycheck and payday loans dayloans is only good for feeling better than someone, most likely while pretending that all people in debt are stupid because they buy too many cars and TVs or whatever.

The whole area (both nutrition and debt/poverty) is very complex, especially when looking at whole society. Thinking in simple caricatures, and dismissing people as stupid is helping nobody.

If you want to discuss the socioeconomic reasons for the rise in obesity, I think there’s plenty of meat there to discuss meaningfully. That’s very different from discussing gut flora or gut neural connections or metabolism. Indeed, all the ways that “people are different” are irrelevant because the rise in obesity is a societal problem. It’s not about the individuals and their differences.

If you’re an individual who wants to lose weight, focus on calories in and calories out because those are the biggest factors by far and they are also largely within your control. If you want to talk about social problems then ignore individuals and discuss the broader problems that are leading to such a large and consistent calories in discrepancy. In either case gut flora is probably not the major factor and probably not where the solution will be found.

I also didn’t dismiss anyone as stupid and your accusation is out of place.

> focus on calories in and calories out because those are the biggest factor

A lot of people tried that, and it didn't work, but we never got to "why doesn't it work for so many people" because people like you keep parroting "CICO! You're just weak! CICO! CICO!!" even though it helps nobody.

Of course, calories in and calories out are mostly out of your control, but we're past that, since this has now become about moral judgment of obese people.

You’ve now accused me of calling people both stupid and weak, when I’ve done neither of those. You’re not even trying to have an actual constructive conversation. If your goal is to have mutually beneficial discussions or even just to educate those you disagree with, you might try not being so hostile.

More to the point, you haven’t said anything meaningful about society’s obesity problem except to assert that everyone with a weight problem is a victim completely lacking in agency.

Every time every human exhales, they exhale carbon. That carbon comes from the food they eat.

If a person doesn't eat enough food, the carbon comes from stored fat cells.

Regardless of those differences, people don't become (or remain) obese with a consistent healthy diet.

Have you ever taken immunosuppressants?

Starvation can kill anyone, no matter how different they are.

No one debates any of this stuff when it comes to animals. No one thinks their dog has a slow metabolism or different gut flora or different neural connections. They think their dog is fat because he’s eating too much and the cure is to feed him less. Amazingly it always works, assuming the dog’s owners actually follow through with feed him less.