I think on the whole it’s a good thing to have psychological and physiological solutions to obesity. But I don’t think that changes anything. Ultimately the medical advice has remained consistent: the best way to lose and maintain weight is a healthy diet and/or physical activity. Calories in must be less than calories out to lose.
Unless someone has a truly impactful psychological or physiological obstacle to implementing that advice, what is gained pursuing any other end?
I agree with you but theoretically isn’t this kind of like “take your medicine” advice? If you don’t take the medicine, you don’t get better. To what end should we invest society’s resources into ever cleverer ways to get people to “take their medicine”?
Why is this "better" than GLP-1 agonists or bariatric surgery or non-surgical procedures? All of these are accepted procedures approved for use by medical board around the world.
As someone who lost about half their body weight, I feel very much that just about everybody who has a problem with weight loss meets this criteria.
The question is: why is it so easy for so many people to stay a healthy weight without even paying attention to it, and for others it require constant attention and suffering?
Until we can answer and that, weight loss is most definitely not a solved problem.
Society and the easy access to indulging high caloric and straight up unhealthy food. You don't see a lot (if any) fat people in certain parts of the world where access to cheap, unhealthy, highly caloric food is not as readily available as it is in the US. The literal problem around here is "I have too much access to food, and I'm unable to stop myself from eating it".
Some people get addicted to cocaine, others to meth, heroine, others to alcohol, and others, to food (Sugar has been found to be MORE addicting than cocaine BTW). So it is an addiction problem, but because it is tabboo to tell someone they should eat that much, it becomes a hard problem to address.
They appeal to emotion, i.e. "I will be hungry, do you know how hard is to go hungry?", yeah, thats your body craving its addiction, you know how hard is to quit alcohol cold turkey? It literally can kill you, so its almost the same with food.
Someone else commented that some people lose a lot of weight, and then they gain it again 5 years down the road. Thats because the adiction won, at that point you gotta treat your food habits like an addiction. At least with alcohol and drugs, you can literally avoid it and not go near it, and still live fine. You cannot live without food so it makes the tempation of overindulging even higher.
The word "unhealthy" is doing a lot of lifting in that sentence. For instance, there's the Kitvian people, who have no food scarcity whatsoever and a diet that consists of 70% carbohydrates, which a lot of nutrition "science" tells us is bad, yet obesity is completely unknown to them.
Or the Maasai diet, which is about 66% fat, yet they also don't have an obesity problem.
Sugar consumption in Austrailia between 1980 and 2003 dropped 23% but obesity nearly trippled.
The idea that this is merely due to food addiction caused by some "unhealthy" quality of what we're eating is not well supported by the data. Or at least we haven't isolated what exactly the "unhealthy" part of that is yet.
It seems to me that traditional diets with long observed health outcome histories paired with self discipline lead to better results than the constantly reinvented hyper-processed fad food products (aka fiat foods) consumed in large health safety net environments.
The US is dumpster fire, and I say that as a US citizen. We have so much high-calorie, low quality food, and so many obstacles to healthful food security in some places, that it borders on the intuitive that these would be significant contributing factors.
But I don't see what else can be done. Ultimately, dieting is an individual effort, because only you control what you eat. You can be given all the advice and meal plans and other information in the world, but the hardest part is choosing a side salad over fries, or not buying the snacks you love but know aren't good for you. If a doctor said "take this medicine because you have condition X" and the patient doesn't do it, is it the doctor's fault?
Think about it from the doctor's perspective.
The doctor prescribes medicine X as a first line intervention and it doesn't work. The patient is unable to tolerate it.
After multiple failed attempts trying medicine X, the doctor opts to recommend that the patient consider medicine Y as a second line intervention, which has a much higher success rate but significant additional risks.
Makes sense, right? Doctor wants to help the patient.
Now swap "medicine X" for "dietary counseling" and "medicine Y" for say "bariatric surgery". That's not really unreasonable.
Here's a copypasta from another comment I made.
Society and the easy access to indulging high caloric and straight up unhealthy food. You don't see a lot (if any) fat people in certain parts of the world where access to cheap, unhealthy, highly caloric food is not as readily available as it is in the US. The literal problem around here is "I have too much access to food, and I'm unable to stop myself from eating it".
Some people get addicted to cocaine, others to meth, heroine, others to alcohol, and others, to food (Sugar has been found to be MORE addicting than cocaine BTW). So it is an addiction problem, but because it is tabboo to tell someone they should eat that much, it becomes a hard problem to address.
They appeal to emotion, i.e. "I will be hungry, do you know how hard is to go hungry?", yeah, thats your body craving its addiction, you know how hard is to quit alcohol cold turkey? It literally can kill you, so its almost the same with food.
Someone else commented that some people lose a lot of weight, and then they gain it again 5 years down the road. Thats because the adiction won, at that point you gotta treat your food habits like an addiction. At least with alcohol and drugs, you can literally avoid it and not go near it, and still live fine. You cannot live without food so it makes the tempation of overindulging even higher.
Healthy food also tastes delicious. And while changing one's diet - or any habit - requires willpower, if one has healthy standards set early in life it is not that difficult to continue with them or pick them back up.
One commonality between diets as different as a vegan one or all beef one is the emphasis on eating real food rather than processed garbage.
However I think the idea that there is something present environmentally that is causing a systemic issue should not be discounted. People in the 70s did not eat particularly healthy. They liked to watch tv, had Doritos and snack cakes, were just as lazy, and did not have any more willpower, discipline, or education than people do now.
Just want to say that, in my experience, this is only if you're in the habit of regularly eating unhealthy food. Once you break that habit and your body adjusts to eating healthier food, eating unhealthy food regularly becomes too rich/heavy/sweet.
For example: I used to eat a ton of Reese's pieces when I was younger. This weekend over Thanksgiving, I had a few pieces and came to find that they were now WAY too sweet. Same goes for soda, once water is your baseline drink soda becomes far too syrupy and sweet.
Definitely.
With food is harder because your addiction is right in your face every day.