With all due respect, this is nonsense. This is a very common trope, but I can guarantee you the vast vast vast majority of people who are obese have tried “eating less and moving more,” and that is not new advice to them. Nobody who has been obese for a long time walks into a doctor’s office going “okay I finally think I want that injection that will help me lose weight” as if they just suddenly noticed they’re obese.
There are lots of reasons they might not have been able to deal with it before, and “laziness” is not usually in the top 5. Genetics, means, access to knowledge, living in a food desert, depression, etc. are all far more likely causes.
Being obese sucks. People who are obese are far more aware of that than anyone choosing to judge them from afar.
When people fail at health, (as when they fail at finance or addiction), a lot of propaganda tells us to blame individuals, with no sympathy or awareness of our failing systems.
SMH at the cruelty....
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-lab-rats-are-...
Many (most?) people have a fundamental need to feel superior to some "other". This need is strong enough to the point where they'd rather be doing poorly themselves so long as there is at least some other group that's doing worse. Were you to give them an opportunity to significantly improve their own lives but in a way that everyone ends up on the same level, they'd balk.
Obesity is one of the few conditions that are socially acceptable to openly mock, and as such, it's like catnip to people who need to feed their inferiority complex.
Cruel indeed.
(Don’t want to try to find a source for this - consider it as hearsay)
Then I asked my doctor to give me a different medicament, because I suspected a variation of a deficiency. Her answer was: I don't have experience with that medicament, but after four months she relented. One week later my craving was much, much less.
This experience astounded me extremely deeply.
I have come to the conclusion that there are some body processes, let's say instincts, that can go astray.
Compare this to drowning. Even if people know that there's only water, they try breathe. It's just too strong an instinct.
Having experienced this, I now respect obese people. They just have the bad luck that their instinct of eating derailed. Now they not only lost body fitness but also respect.
Why?
I have a kidney disorder that causes me to waste potassium. Without a supplement, I can't get enough in my natural diet without eating like 10-20 avocados a day, or 6 cups of spinach.
A fun side effect of hypokalemia is that your muscles get really sore, like you just did a full body workout. So, you can literally feel when your potassium is low.
The low salt coincides with some of the most intense food cravings I've ever experienced. I don't crave foods high in potassium, however; just foods with a lot of regular NaCl. So, my body does its best to tell me I need to eat something, triggering a psychological compulsion to get it, but the compulsion is to eat the wrong thing.
I'm just one data point, but I think this might extrapolate out to more people than just me. If you're compelled to overeat, you might be missing some key nutrient that just isn't present in abundance in your current diet. The trick is finding out what it is.
Random related thought - awhile back there was a series of blog posts that got pretty popular (I can't remember the blog's name) trying to investigate the root cause of obesity. They settled on some odd conclusions, but one of the things they noted in their meta-analysis of extant obesity research is that places with lower obesity have more of a particular dissolved mineral (they asserted lithium was the root cause, but I didn't find their conclusions convincing) in their drinking water.
It could be that there are trace elements that, if you don't have mineral-rich drinking water, are otherwise hard to get from a standard diet that drive this craving behavior that I've experienced.
If you are overweight, eat less/eat better and exercise.
If you are addicted to alcohol or drugs, quit.
Those are the ideals. If you can do those things it's better than depending on chemicals that for-profit pharmaceutical companies would love to see you buying for the rest of your life.
But if you can't do those things, it's probably better than continuing the status quo. Better to pay Reckitt Benckiser than support some criminal fentanyl dealers. I feel that many people have never really tried, or tried but did not appreciate that it would be really hard, and gave up.