Advertising is only part of the problem, as is accessibility and price. You don't grow obese by eating a candy bar once a week, you have to turn your unhealthy food consumption into a pattern and patterns of behaviour are inherently difficult to change.

You can remove all advertising for candy and fast food and most people will still not lose any weight. At best you'll prevent new obesity cases by a tiny margin.

When actively trying to lose weight, the body and mind resist. Partially because change is hard, partially because you're running your bodies on fewer calories on purpose. There is the ever present feeling of "I could go for a quick snack but I really really shouldn't".

I don't believe there will ever be this One Secret Trick That Doctors Hate to losing weight (except for getting dangerously ill, perhaps). However, if research like this can lead to ways to reduce some of the symptoms of cutting calories, I think the world might become a lot healthier.

There is also always the risk of this being exploited, of course; I'd imagine some less than humane leaders would be all to pleased if their working populace wouldn't be complaining about hunger all the time. The brain exhibits this behaviour for a reason, probably a good one, and surpressing it willy-nilly can only end in disaster.

The “trick” is to eat whole foods that will make you feel full even when eating less.

"people with a lack of willpower"

Well, people who lack willpower still want to solve their weight problem. They can't use willpower because they don't have it. This is why they look for secret tricks.

Not so complicated.

Solution to weight problem that I found is simple, even if somewhat expensive: dietary catering (as in: having ready-made meals delivered to your doorstep).

The problem isn't usually quantity of food, but quality. Having 5 pre-packaged, healthy, low GI meals delivered makes it quite easy to follow the diet. Also, you don't even have to reduce calorie intake in the beginning: feel free to order 2500-3000 calorie option, if you so wish. You won't be losing any weight on that, but at least your metabolism, your glucose levels will stabilize. Then, after 2-3 weeks adjustment period, change your calorie intake to 1500 calories and continue for another month or two - the results are almost magical.

I wonder if it would make sense to have the government heavily subsidize healthy, low GI, low calorie density meal preparation and delivery, bringing it down to the cost of the cheapest junk food?

I imagine it would be expensive, but only as expensive as food and delivery of it, and would reduce much more expensive health care costs, right?

I've had similar results! At first when I tried monitoring my diet, I assumed that 2600 calories/day with exercise would be good enough, but I was only losing ~1lb/month. It did make it way easier for me to transition to 1.5-2k calories though, I'm not sure I could've done that from the start.

And it's definitely easier to feel satisfied off low cal food if it's nutritious - smoothies with protein powder and greens? Filling and diet friendly (esp if no milk). Water? Low cal, but you'll definitely still feel cravings.

There are so many different ways to address mindfulness around eating. I'm glad you found one that works well for you! I'm a big fan of meal prep and portion control. Casual servings often end up being several times larger than necessary. I agree with you that practicing deliberate portioning is really important.

Another big issue is condiments. It's really easy to add a few tbsp of dressing to an otherwise healthy meal, which can add a few hundred "hidden" calories.

I don't believe you don't understand why people would want to find easier ways to lose weight.

You’re trying to treat cancer with bandaids

If there were a bandaid cure for cancer, we’d use it.

Absolutely. But there isn't a bandaid for either cancer or obesity.

Of course there isn't. That's why we're still looking for one.

Looking for easy solutions is very understandable, re: the original topic.

+1. People seem to think that, since they had to suffer through diet and exercise to lose weight, everyone else should have to suffer equally; for some reason people think it's "unfair" to lose weight through e.g. medications. This makes no sense, and it isn't consistent with how we treat any other illness.

Being fat isn’t an illness in the same sense as we normally define it. It’s a conscious decision making process that is self-inflicted. It’s lazy to turn to medication just because the real method is difficult. Most medication has side effects, deal with the root issue instead

1. By your logic, is type 2 diabetes also not an illness, since it's caused by excess sugar consumption?

2. Why is it wrong to solve problems the easy way? Why should people have to follow the "difficult" path of dieting if an easier method exists? That's not being lazy, it's being smart by avoiding unnecessary effort.

3. Many diets also have side effects (e.g. hunger, fatigue). But regardless, if people would rather experience side effects from medication than go through the difficult experience of dieting, why is that wrong?

1. Ok sorry, I’m not trying to rigorously define what an illness is, I’m just saying obesity is categorically different because it’s self inflicted and reversible

2. It isn’t wrong in every situation, just in this particular one the motivating factor is lack of willpower, prioritization and education. There isn’t an “easy way” as of right now. If one comes along it will also likely carry side effects

3. Its usually ill-informed because the difficulty of dieting is a known one and steps can be taken to alleviate or bypass these issues. Usually medication with outsized effects have proportional side-effects. And we don’t always know what they are. I don’t leave out the possibility that someone could invent a pill that causes huge weight loss with little side-effects, but I would bet a lot of money against it

"I’m just saying obesity is categorically different because it’s self inflicted and reversible"

I encourage you to examine the implicit judgement and bias within this statement. When you say "self inflicted," are you suggesting that people should simply exercise willpower and change their behaviors? What if they cannot, either because they do not know how, or because there are related psychological problems intersecting with their weight issues?

Is depression self-inflicted? What about depressive eating patterns, resulting in weight gain? We know that being overweight is almost universally disliked. We know that most people expend great amounts of time and money on ineffective solutions.

Saying "it's self inflicted" ignores that most overweight people are not able to solve their eating disorder. It's inaccurate, in exactly the same way that it would be inaccurate to dismiss depression as "self-inflicted." Food is tied to very deep motivators within the human brain. Empirically we can very clearly see that most people are not capable of resolving these issues on their own. Generally speaking, it's a symptom of a psychological disorder.

You’re right it’s a bit harsh. I admit I don’t fully understand the reason why obese people can’t climb out of the hole they’ve dug. It’s psychological like you said but also societal (food is becoming less nutritious, as well as readily available empty caloric foods). If people lack the ethic to revert course then we need to start fixing the underlying issues causing people to overeat to such an extent in the first place.

I still think it’s helpful for people to know that their weight issues are usually fixable as long as they have the determination and desire, there’s people that do this every day and share their journey

Sure, finding the right method to solve an issue is important. I agree fixes with their own problems (medication) shouldn't be viewed as a panacea.

Hey, have a good one!

> It’s a conscious decision making process that is self-inflicted.

I doubt very many people make a deliberate conscious decision to gain excessive amounts of weight, especially if they're dieting. You can argue that people should be making a conscious decision to navigate the labyrinth of data, misinformation, scammers, etc to try to learn what they actually need to do to lose weight successfully but I think most people just eat what they like best from what's available when they feel like eating and are more often than not surprised at the weight they gain. Even animals in research labs on strictly controlled diets who have had the same food intake and lifestyle for decades have been unexpectedly gaining weight.

I think it's safe to say that there's a lot more going on with weight gain than lazy people making a conscious decision to be fat and a lot more involved in losing that weight. Anyone can starve themselves, but loosing weight while staying healthy isn't always so simple. Changing a person's habits and lifestyles aren't always simple either. If medications can help, people should absolutely use them.

We have band-aids for both.

Both cancer and weight loss are filled to the brim with pills that do absolutely nothing.

Thousands of expensive treatments, no cure (for cancer at least, I believe the weight loss pill industry os 100% fraudulent).

Saw some pill adverts the other day at a restaurant as the tv played. The pill promised to help lose weight without diet or exercise.

At the end of the commercial it was explicitly stated it workwd if used in conjunction with diet and exercise.

This is what the US has become.

> Thousands of expensive treatments, no cure (for cancer at least,

Immunotherapy is pretty damn close to a cure, with very few side-effects. It costs a couple of hundred quid a session to administer, which of course costs the patient nothing.

Not in the US. Here it's almost certainly a death sentence, and unless you are rich it will most certainly bankrupt your entire family.

What on earth are you on about? The US has the highest rates of cancer survival in the world.

Edit on top because this is very close to me and makesy blood boil.

Right now this is what's going on. My best friend John lives with his grandmother Connie who raised him. Last November, so 7+months now, she found out she has lung cancer. Doesn't smoke, but that doesn't matter.

Connie is the sweetest woman and reminds me of my Grandma. Not a mean bone in her body, would do anything for you.

She had to wait ~4 months to get the referral from her doctor. Once she had that she could begin oncology.

3 months later she still can't get an appointment. Connie has tried and called repeatedly, as has John and his other family members.

They are broken watching her waste away, and she can't even get in to begin assessment much less treatment.

So tired of people with statistics which can be and are gamed, or people with money and insurance assuming everyone does.

Connie is going to die, she knows this, and her last few months are nothing but terror and frustration and sadness all around.

Original comment+My 3 family members who died to cancer. Being in the cancer wards and oncology centers and getting to know lots of patients.

This is the reality. If you have money and insurance cancer will break you. If you have nothing it is almost a guaranteed death sentence.

But hey, you've got a statistic!

Response to the edit:

Yeah that sucks, but your experience doesn't define the broader landscape.

I had a sister with cancer, and we were very, very poor when she was diagnosed. She still managed to get treatment and make a full recovery, albeit we did end up with a good deal of medical debt. Nonetheless, she lived.

Why does your anecdote carry more weight than mine? It doesn't. I understand you're going through a very difficult time but the solution is not to deny statistics and established facts in favor of your poor experience. People die, it sounds like your family is genetically predisposed to lethal cancers.

Yes as it happens statistics are more accurate than anecdotes, especially if they're well documented and proven like this one.

Cancer isn't trivial to treat, people are going to die from it. Just, less people in America compared to other countries.

You're basically saying "Well I know people that died from this very lethal disease here in the US, therefore other countries must be so much further ahead". Which isn't really logically coherent.

The metaproblem is that you're thinking of this as a systems problem, the people who irk you are thinking of it as isolated—an isolated closed-box test, no less.

Like, most people in this discussion would not think of mental-health therapy as a diet plan, but if you're thinking in terms of the systems involved then that seems more likely to generate more weight loss than any fad diet over a long run.

It's just really tempting to be reductive.

> most people in this discussion would not think of mental-health therapy as a diet plan

Absolutely.

"Just eat less" is not a viable strategy for a parent working 60-70 hours per week who needs to eat a high calorie diet, among other unhealthy practices, just to stay barely functional to support their family.

Or someone who is so exhausted by their work just to keep a roof over their head that they have no mental energy to think about shopping for different food, preparing it, and so on.

I have more energy and can work more hours since I switched to a Keto diet.

I think it's probably the other way around: you fix your diet first, and mental health will improve as a result.

> eat a high calorie diet, among other unhealthy practices

Eating a high-calorie diet is not unhealthy.

It often isn't lack of will power, but other issues. Nobody wants to be overweight or obese, but people suffer from all sorts of other issues that make it harder for them to get their life in order.

I dunno man, I've been super fat all my life, except in college when I decided to get in shape

I developed a healthy diet and healthy habits, and was able to get down to a healthy weight.. but staying there required a constant influx of willpower. If I only ate enough food to stay at a low weight, I was hungry all the time. (Eventually I ballooned back out, although now I'm losing weight again since I've realized that Morbid Obesity is no place for old men)

I think there is a systems issue at work. My body is just calibrated to hog food until it gets pretty fat, and then it'll stay there unless I do something out of the ordinary.

Telling fat people to get their shit together can work, the same way telling poor people to learn to code works. (I don't think that thin people are thin because they're hungry all the time and they overpower those urges, the same way poor people aren't necessarily all bad people who piss away all their money)

I agree with this. As a non overweight person I don't feel hungry all the time.

However, I don't think it is genetics can explain why the obesity rate has exploded in recent decades.

Seeing friends and family members that are overweight, they tend to have some similar habits. They consume a lot of liquid calories, ie sodas, fruit juice, sugar in coffee etc. They also eat calorie dense foods, ie ranch dressing, fast food, cookies while consuming fewer fruits and vegetables. They also tend to not consume as much protein and are usually fairly sedentary.

I don't think blaming individuals does much good, but at the same time I don't think some people are just doomed to be fat. If everyone around you is eating healthy non calorie dense food and walking a lot you probably will too. Conversely if everyone around you is eating high quantities of processed food while being sedentary you probably will too.

Yeah this aligns pretty well with the research.

There's a lot we don't know. But it definitely does appear that a lot of obese people have some sort of homeostatic miscalibration on where their body's set point is for weight. The mechanisms involved there are numerous and complex. It's quite possible that there's something simple going on that could be adjusted in the future to get a person's weight set point down, and from there it's quite likely that they will be able to autoregulate. Conversely, it's really hard for any intervention to succeed long-term when a person's weight doesn't match this internal set point.

> some sort of homeostatic miscalibration

Possibly leftovers of a highly adaptive mechanism that let some of their ancestors survive times of extreme famine?

That's at least partially true, but there are serious issues with that explanation if you want to explain all of the effect. In particular, there really does appear to be something different going on in the last 2-4 decades or so affecting people's internal set points. When you compare to other recent historical times where there was also an abundance of food, people were self-regulating better than they are now.

There actually is a fix for your particular issue (and indeed this would help many people).

You just need to eat nutritiously dense, high fiber foods that have low caloric density to fill you up.

So a diet heavy in vegetables and whole foods would keep you full without keeping you at a heavier weight.

This would allow you to maintain a caloric deficit to get to your goal weight without going hungry, and once you get to your goal weight you can just reintroduce other foods that are more calorically dense if you'd like.

There's a subreddit filled with examples of this kinda thing: https://www.reddit.com/r/Volumeeating/

Thanks man. I did notice that when I moved to Japan for a few years, I lost a pretty decent amount of weight just from the different habits

I'll check that out for sure.. right now I'm in the honeymoon phase of dieting, where I can lose weight by just switching from sugary soda to sparkling water and staying away from American restaurants

It's quite simple to understand. An individual has a much greater control over their diet and activity than they do over the multifaceted forces that have lead to the current food situation in the West.

If you find a secret trick to dieting, it literally could not matter less that you are "enabling yet more of the bad behavior". Being thin isn't some magically ennobling activity, and the only reasons one might prefer weighing less are practical (health, comfort, appearance, etc depending on the person). A hypothetical magic diet pill would solve 100% of these issues, and would in fact render tackling those core problems useless. Does such a pill exist? Well obviously not, but that's a very different claim from the one you made.

After moving tk the USA I was shocked to find that fast food (mcD, burger king, etc) was cheaper than buying fruit and vegetables. In South Africa anything that tastes good costs a lot more money, so you're naturally more inclined to eat healthy - or eat nothing but meat, which is how my demographic solved that problem. Also, try and find granola or cereal without sugar, corn syrup, or dextrose (low fat or sugar free products all seem to contain dextrose, which is like "super sugar", congrats food industry on selling that one.)

I doubt that lack of willpower is often the issue. Even a slightly more efficient metabolism can lead to 5 lbs per year of additional weight with no increase in caloric consumption. That adds up quickly.

Properly balancing caloric efficiency at a young age is probably far more effective long term and honestly likely more pragmatic.

I don't understand the obsession with not seeking effective medical solutions over impossible solutions that feel moral like changing human nature or society to be less obesogenic.

Even if you eat healthy food you still need willpower to prevent yourself from eating too much. But it's a easier problem

Tackling the "core problem" of "all life has evolved to build a surplus of energy given a surplus of resources over the course of the lifetime of our universe" feels way harder to solve through willpower than addressing the biology directly.

Someone made an idle, curious comment and you called it an obsession.

Very good points, I'm saving that text in my library