A Chemical Hunger opens up with a list of mysteries related to the obesity epidemic. I don’t endorse the list – for one, “wild animals are becoming obese” seems to have been pretty much made up (see the fourth point in this comment), and all evidence we have that “lab animals are becoming obese” is exactly one (1) unreplicated paper co-authored by a guy that has been involved in numerous controversies regarding his conflict of interest with the processed food and restaurant industries.[8]

And tell me, what percent of people successfully pull this off conventionally, in the long term, again?

If you took that success percentage and applied it to literally anything else, would it still make sense to blame the person who's trying but failing to be part of that percentage?

a) That movement is unrelated to diet, which is not true. Every moment that you're walking to the bus stop, that you're spending on the bus, that you're hanging out at the fat men's club is a moment that you're not eating.

b) That diet isn't related to behavior, which is also false. Being happy with other people likely reduces depression-driven eating triggers.

> Hunger is a drive controlled by hormones, and something in the Western diet has hijacked it.

Why does it have to be only diet and not environment? You could similarly claim that uncontrolled social media in the Western world is driving large numbers of people to depression and overeating.

The current second-best way are the GLP agonist drugs, which tweak hormones.

A very, very distant third is behavior modification/"changing diet and exercise regimen".

Now, to avoid gaining in the first place, you do have some points.

Someday soon, we're going to finally figure out the hideously complex orchestration of hunger, satiety and fat storage in the human body, and the obesity epidemic will finally end, and for the rest of human history this will be known as the "obesity era" /sigh

Lastly, speaking as a Mounjaro taker, you don't quite understand how this works. I do not have to exert willpower from the daily finite reserve I get in order to will it downwards. I do not have to change what I eat. I do not have to force myself to fast. I do not have to exercise (in fact, I exercise for other reasons, such as mood and mental clarity!). I do not have to calorie-track. I do not have to limit myself to specific foods. Here's what happens: I'm simply less hungry and reach satiety much quicker and that makes all the difference. I have far fewer "naggy" feelings of wanting to snack, I often don't finish meals, and I can use that spare willpower on other things in my life that need it, which is fantastic.