Traveling from a fairly walkable, but still car dependent midwestern city to NYC and also Europe in the last few months, it's amazing how much our living environment contributes. My first day in NYC and Europe I put in about 14k steps and at least according to my phone, one of those days I burned 750 cal just walking around to various places. Just by living my life I was WAY more active.

Making the good choice the easy/only choice is the only way to solve this problem long-term (without drugs)

I agree. I lived in West LA for a few years and noticed that I was just walking around a lot more than in previous locations. I measured it to be typically 5 to 10 miles per day (I don't recall the number of steps but I recall getting close to 30k/day on some days). And I wasn't going out of my way to go walking --- it just happened because I walked to work, to get groceries, to visit friends, to go to the movies, etc. To me, the best long-term answer is also to change the environment to be more amenable to walking.

> They rather make obvious habits effortless.

I wouldn’t call taking the stairs in a pre-elevator world “effortless”, rather it was just the only option.

I also think better food handling/storage/treatment/blah means we absorb & retain more of the calories that we consume.

The vast majority of accessible American foods these days are over-processed, poor quality ingredients with fancy marketing on the boxes. (And stories about how the brand was started by a grandmother a century ago...)

Agree. "Defaults matter".

The amount of food you eat isn't a habit. And I don't know what it is that makes people obese, but I don't think it's simply "bad food" as in the stereotype of bad food.

It seems clear enough to me that there is something - something - in the ecosystem that messes up the body's weight / energy homeostasis and we haven't identified the culprit. It might be a food additive, but it could be something to do with artificial light in the evening or plasticizers in our plastic products or who knows what.

Just my pov as non-overweight person who doesn't exercise (other than flipping my four year old around), doesn't walk or run long distances (but a 5 mile walk every couple of months doesn't phase me), eats very few fruits and vegetables, generally eats mostly meat, pasta, bread, cheese, cream and potatoes, and ends up in a fast food outlet maybe once a week on average.

recommended reading about the environmental factor hypothesis

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NRrbJJWnaSorrqvtZ/on-not-get...

it doesn't have to be just habit, but cultural/learned factors likely play a huge part.

each generation eats more, gets bigger, obesity runs in the family, (many obesity associated genes are mostly expressed in the brain ... the typical cursed environment-gene interaction), portion sizes got bigger, it became normal to gulp down a lot more sugar, etc.