And yet most obese people are no more addicted to food than you are addicted to oxygen...

It's so bizarre how many people will pretzel their way into moralistic non sense to find a solution to what is clearly a medical problem.

Obesity as far as we understanding it now is an hunger regulation problem. For unknown reason a lot of people still feel the need to eat even when their body is clearly in calory surplus.

No amount of of impulse control or moderation can make you override billions of years of evolution and not eat when you are starving... if we could... society would be a very different place

My theory is that consuming sugar makes you more hungry. You can eat until you're full, but if you eat desert or a sugary snack a little later, it makes you feel less full and you can eat more. As if your brain notices the sugar source and switches into "full loading mode" and craves more of this historically rare resource.

> And yet most obese people are no more addicted to food than you are addicted to oxygen...

Most obese people seem to be addicted to sugary food, soft drings, desert and all that, which then triggers more eating.

In addition, it might be a gut bacteria thing. If your gut is used to processing lots of sugar, you crave it even more and fighting your gut microbiome requires way too much impulse control and moderation.

The solution might be to recognize this mechanism, remove all sugar from the diet and find a way to control impulses for a few weeks until the gut bacteria changed.

Drinking water and chewing sugar-free gum helps me to remove food cravings temporarily with no downsides. But... I have a normal weight.

I think insulin resistance from excess calorie and carbohydrate consumption has a lot to do with it. One of the symptoms of hyperglycemia is increased hunger, since glucose is staying in your blood stream instead of getting into your cells. 1/3 Americans have prediabetes, and more than that are probably developing insulin resistance.

> For unknown reason a lot of people still feel the need to eat even when their body is clearly in calory surplus.

Boredom, stress, unhappy life, happy life, laziness - it could be anything. You know what it couldn’t be? Exercise. I’m yet to see a person working out hard and eating at the same time.

> I’m yet to see a person working out hard and eating at the same time.

No, but plenty of people have their hunger stimulated by exercise and eat too much after.

You simply can't fix being overweight or obese with exercise alone in the vast majority of people. Even if you don't believe in the constrained total energy model that a good chunk of metabolic research PhDs think is at least somewhat true and instead believe solely in the additive model, exercise stimulates hunger and it's far easier to eat 1000 calories than burn 1000 calories.

You have to do both and exercise doesn't automatically make the other easy.

Ok, in the US start talking about food addiction seriously and see what happens.

Do you remember how long it took to get tobacco mostly banned in the US? Do you remember how much the tobacco industry played the skeptic and introduced bunk science into the mix?

Well Coca Cola, Pepsico, Nestle, and all the other junk food companies have been on this game for years now. Want to change school curriculum?, well your political opponent has $100,000-$1,000,000 more than you from the make people fat industry. Meanwhile there are a crazy number of attack ads against you for being a crazy commie that wants to control peoples lives, you socialist bastard, you're against freedom.

The presently addicted and obese thank you for your service to the future.