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