We all want to be happy, if for some reason happiness for you is tied a lot more to eating than to being healthy and fit, you can try all you want it just wont make you happy if you do. That means tackling obesity means also asking yourself hard questions about what food does for you, how it got that way (e.g. having grandparents which nearly starved can have an severe effect on the food habits for a few generations down the line, sometimes parents can only express their affection through food which means now you equate food with existential parental love). Changing habits is hard, understanding your own psychological drivers and doing something about it against the resistance of your brain is way harder. Never underestimate the struggles other people have to take in order to do the thing that is easy for you.

Anyway, the point was that being ok with being obese because you are happiest eating a lot doesn’t make eating less any more complicated. It’s just choosing to do something different, which everyone is free to do.

Similarily it is totally easy to imagine getting fit/slim by ignoring the forces acting on someone who is obese. Of course one can do that if it fits with ones world image, but I tend to like my models closer to reality.

Don't underestimate what it does to a kid if e.g. one parent has troubles expressing love through any other means than cooking. Suddenly love comes in the form of food. Similar with situation where ancestors nearly starved — this can fuck up multiple generations. Both examples will take conscious effort to tackle one's psychological drivers, maybe therapy, but quite certainly a lot of time and effort.

Think about a bad habbit you tried to loose and multiply it by a magnitude then you get a glimpse of what this would feel like for an actual obese person (note: I am not obese, neither have I ever been obese). This is why "just eat less and move more" as a statement is ridiculous: a bit like "have you just tried not to be poor" or "have you tried not being depressed all the time". While factually correct it displays ignorance of the forces at play.

If the part I don’t understand is that there is no such thing as being overweight and happy, and people who feel that way have psychological defects, then it’s not that I don’t understand your point but I do disagree.

Most obese people are not happy with their body or the ways their eating habits impact their live in many ways. Most obese people are also happy when they eat or worse: they are unhappy when they don't eat.

If eating gives you a short term improvement even if it makes you unhappy in the long term then you might just do it, like in any other addiction (btw. a well researched topic).

The way out of this is not to "just eat less", the way out of this is to tackle the reason why you only can be happy when eating and then eat less.

The point is that overeating won’t make us happy either. Maybe it will give some 15 seconds of gratification but then most of us will feel guilt, and the long term effect has terrible consequences. Maybe the problem lies also in the fact that our simple brains can’t really understand the future. I’ve read somewhere that many asiatic languages don’t have a future tense, hence people there when facing the choice of eating something think along the lines “if I eat this I AM fatter/less healthy” and this could be a factor in the way lower obesity prevalence.

I don't deny that. Some get unhappy enough to derive enough energy from this unhappiness to tackle this as a real problem. Of course the first box you need to tick to get better is to accept your behaviour is problematic and realize that it makes you unhappy in the long term.

Some might never reach that step to begin with. Many however realize the problems and want to get better but they can't because they constantly fight the symptoms and not the cause, or because their lives give them enough excuses not to do it (whether they are valid excuses or not doesn't matter too much).

I chose to believe that people are a product of both their environments and their own choices. So we are neither completely determined by the circumstances we grew up in nor are we completely free to decide to "just" do things 180° different than we were lead to believe our whole lives. We can shape our environments and ourselves within certain boundaries and over given timescales, but for this we need to know the forces which act upon us. And everybody has forces acting upon them, the believes, rationalizations and stories we tell ourselves about our place in the world are partly a product of this: we try to be happy with ourselves in the place that we have within the universe. We try to establish meaning in the chaos.

This is why explainations like "some people are just lazy" is less of a true statement about the world, but more of a true statement about the stories a certain type of person has to tell themselves in order to feel good. Because if the weren't "just lazy" suddenly one had to reflect upon the environment, the incentive structures that shaped them into the way they are. Suddenly one would feel the ethical need to change said environment and feel powerless confronted with the scale of the problem. Nah. Moar better to say they are "just lazy", then one can stop thinking.

Lazyness is a bug, it's a failure state, it's a medical condition. Much like depression, psychology cannot treat it in all cases, but taking the approach that people are just born lazy and iredeemable seems like the most unscientific, least promising, and most likely to annoy your devoted commenter.

Granted, they often don't think through how to do that, or why the person might be struggling to perform, but it's not usually a belief that the person is incapable of doing better.

Anyway, to say to somebody "don't procrastinate" is like given a guitar to somebody and tell them "just play!". Sure man, how?

I feel like a whole lot of people are trying to help, they're just really bad at it and they need help themselves.

.

Thankfully, psychiatry!

Read a book, boys & girls & enby friends.

Yes. This is exactly what I was trying to get across.

Thanks.

This gets to the very important question of how much choice do we really have.

People are the way they are because of how they were raised, their genetics, where and among whom they were raised and their life experiences. There's arguably some choice mixed in there too, somewhere, but how much real choice people have is debatable.

If people don't have much choice in the way they are, it explains why they have a really hard time changing, and there's no sense in blaming them for something they can't change.

Of course some people do change, but maybe that's because they were the kind of person who could, and other people are the kinds of people who can't.

I appreciate that you're very empathetic, and I feel like not everyone else is. There's a whole lot of people who probably can't imagine what it's like to be somebody else. That's hard, isn't it?

But when you tell lazy people not to be lazy, and they don't do it, then it almost sounds like you must either be calling them dumb, or defective.

So that's why I feel like thinking of it as treatable is a nice and friendly middle ground. Which a lot of people don't seem to.

That doesn't seem to be their impulse. Oh, they're lazy. Let's not fix that.

I've also ran through the mountains until I literally couldn't stand from a pile of stress fractures. Even though very stupid, its an example of mind over matter.

To me laziness is an inability to mentally force action over the brains signals to not incur distress or effort.

I feel pretty confident that there is a large overlap of "lazy people" with people that would have a hard time taking cold showers in the morning for a month, if hot water was available.

This sounds more like you’re trying to explain the behavior of your friends and are choosing the word “laziness”, but that’s a pretty reductive explanation for why some people like to party and others don’t.

Perhaps if you were willing to do the hard work of questioning your own assumptions and seeing life through your friends eyes a little more you could have more sympathy.

But perhaps you aren’t because that’s hard work and causes distress you’d rather not incur, and it’s much easier to describe human behavior as “laziness” than to understand it’s causes.

woke: accusing people of being unwilling to do the hard work.

you know who wasn't lazy in school? All the immigrant friends I had.

I could have instead, easily described the 100s of people I grew up around, that would skip work and get drunk instead, spend all their paycheck the day they get it. The obesity, the abuse, the drug addiction.

I have zero sympathy for able bodied people that can't cope enough to feed their children. I don't care the causes, nor are they relevant.

I have worked for $10 an hour doing construction in 100 degree weather, and I have also work as a SWE at a FAANG. I have seen the complete lack of self awareness most professionals and/or those from upper class backgrounds have.

Growing up in generational poverty and finding myself out of it, I carried a similarly angry perspective about people for a while as an adult.

I would suggest listening to the stories of people who you say can’t cope and maybe be open to the idea of empathy.

Zero sympathy costs more energy than you maybe might realize. Is it really worth it? It wasn’t for me.

Any example you pick is going to be complicated. Because they're people. They're doing their best.

Assume good faith. It's not a law, but it helps.

[0] e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhold_Messner

That the person who did it has their own Wikipedia page makes me think it is probably harder.

Edit:maybe I was thinking to complicated in this reply. The analogy is: you have two different things which can be achieved through doing a specific thing, but doing this thing is hard in both cases so using the word 'just' is not appropriate which is easier to see in the example.

But unfortunately this isn't a complicated subject. Weight is controlled by diet and standard healthy diets are very well known. Nearly everyone can keep their weight down. Even if people don't, it is objectively not that hard to do. A lot of people don't accept the rewards are worth the discomfort.

> [keeping their weight down] is objectively not that hard to do

Would you mind picking one?

“Just ride your bike” is an easy solution for someone who is already normal weight but it’s not nearly as easy for someone who’s overweight.

The example of a person with a musculoskeletal system conditioned to carrying around a 60 kg body, but weighs 120 kgs is basically competing in a Olympic powerlifting competition like situation to just do basic tasks(Using toilets, walking for everyday life tasks).

I can only imagine how hard and near impossible task it is for some one to be exercising everyday.

One problem is that calorie restriction itself is modifying how your body works. So, the weight lost in diet is typically gained back super quickly. And if you repeat the cycle, your body also adjusts by spending less calories.

The other problem is that it just lowering calories easily leads to nutritional deficiency of some sort. Which leads to feeling bad all the time, being tired and passive, unable to perform as previously. So the diet will eventually fail for that reason - because you will be more dysfunctional and breaking it will paradoxically make you more functional.