I think those people saying "just eat less" aren't implying that you won't feel hungry, but are instead thinking "you're killing yourself by being obese, better to suffer and feel somewhat hungry all the time than to die 10-15 years earlier".
"Just eat less food" might as well be "just maybe don't have as much (insert addictive drug in here)"
I never realised how much of a problem my hunger was until it went away. Now I don't know how I managed to do it.
The whole point of all of this is that it's important to put yourself in others shoes, understand their perspectives. So, with that said... If it was easy to just not eat food, don't you think they would?
Post COVID I’m subconsciously holding my breath every time I walk past someone in a store. If I had to think about it I’d never get anything else done.
For food it’s right there near the top of your task list every time you hit an interruption. Am I thirsty? Do I need to pee? Am I hungry? Did I promise anyone anything today? Is it time to feed the pets, pick up the kids? It’s not “just” impulse control. It’s interfering with all of your other impulses.
I don’t think neuro-boring people realize how many people around them spend their day trying to look normal instead of just being normal. It’s an elaborate ruse and things like being hangry or in a loud venue make the facade crack and fail.
There are some fat people for whom hunger is instant and incessant and a constant distraction, and perhaps losing 5 years of life at old age is worth it.
For other people, maybe someone who's 20 lbs overweight and would like to be able to play with their kids without running out of breath, maybe the annoyance of being hungry isn't actually that bad for them.
Pain is subjective. One person's excruciating pain - the same stimulus could be a mild annoyance to someone else. I've been tattooed for 6 hours and was able to easily distract myself and laugh while listening to a comedy podcast, other people can't handle holding their finger over a flame for more than a millisecond or can't eat a hot slice of pizza out of the oven.
Pain and annoyance and discomfort can also be acclimated to. What might be really difficult and distracting might become something you get used to and learn to tune out. But then again, to be fair - maybe not. Maybe for some people that hunger is not something they can learn to live with.
It definitely belies a level of privilege that some people must intentionally seek out discomfort or pain in order to begin to even approximate the agony others are inherently forced to live through. I don't believe privilege is itself a moral failing, or we're stuck with whole categories of 'original sin'. It's what objectives its used to enable that potentially indict those that possess it.
Some of those urges may be stronger for some people than for others.
The same way that urges of hunger can be experienced differently by differently people (at both a signaling hormone / chemical level as well as a psychological/willpower equipment level).
Are you suggesting that the feeling of hunger experienced by overweight and obese people is universally a higher standard than any other discomfort or natural drive humans experience?
That’s not a weight-loss plan though, that’s a fit-back-into-your-current-wardrobe plan. People with “weight problems” are generally on an upward slope and a point source puts a notch in the graph, it doesn’t zero the slope or take it negative. What it does say, if anything, is that there are factors we can control that moves the needle, but they are the journey not the destination.
You get used to it. People who claim to get "hangry" (like in those Snickers commercials[1]) need to get a grip. If hunger is all it takes to make you a shitty person then I think hunger isn't actually the primary issue.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shOiXy5b5Ro&themeRefresh=1
I suspect the divergence in opinion comes from the how one defines well-being. Hedonic well-being tends to focus on fulfilling one's appetites, whether hunger or sex or whatever. The problem with that is humans tend toward hedonic adaptation and it can become an endless treadmill to try and feel "full". In a resource rich environment, this can obviously lead to a lot of bad outcomes.
The parent poster is arguing that for some individuals, the experience of being hungry would be preferable to the experience of being obese. Would you disagree with that?
For some overweight and obese people, there are costs like sleep quality / apnea that CPAP might not solve (leading to all sorts of health issues), there can be sexual dysfunction (erection quality, difficulty even accessing the genitals or having sex in many positions), there can be shame and embarrassment (regardless of if you think society SHOULDN'T have that shame, the reality is many overweight or obese people feel it, and avoid certain settings and activities because of it), there is just the raw feeling of physical tiredness, back pain, knee pain, etc. that can come along with the physical stresses it puts on your body, I could really go on.
For some people, those things ARE worse than feeling hungry most or all of the time. For some people, they CAN tolerate a mild or moderate feeling of hunger by distracting themselves or avoiding dwelling on the feeling, and they might find the other parts of their lives improve enough that it's worth it.
Look, I used to be in better shape than pretty much anybody here. Unless you’re an Ironman veteran I have nothing to learn from you about exercise and I can probably teach you a few things. But health problems, especially joint injuries, happen to old people, and they happen much more often to people who are rabid about exercise. I’m not you ten years ago. I’m you twenty years from now. So drop the smug bullshit and learn something.
I'm someone who loves running, always have, the weight gain happened in my 30's, either because I had a kid and suddenly my ability to just run when i had free time disappeared, or because my metabolism slowed down, or most likely both and more.
That said... Now I've started running again daily for the last year, one thing I've noticed. Beginning to exercise whilst overweight is SIGNIFICANTLY harder than it was when normal weight (or because i was 40, probably another "both" here too).
One of the things that made me realise how much harder it is, was some fitness YouTuber put on 20kg of weights and ran, he noticed a number of things were different. Once I saw that it gave me enough fuel to continue ignoring the hunger for another month or so.
If I recall correctly runners estimate about 1 second per km per extra pound carried. That might not hold for body weight (cyclists had an old 1:2:10 rule of thumb that suggests that it might be better to lose 5 lbs than spend a fortune on a pack/bike that weighs 1 lb less, but that rule has been challenged and I don’t know what the new wisdom is.
Edit: kilometers not miles.
It's not well understood by people on average (and those dieting) how to mitigate hunger when restricting calories or how to successfully diet, but they are correct that a deficit is required to lose weight. That's physics and biology. The problem is the knowledge gap leading to strong-willed efforts that can actually backfire.
For instance, there's body fat set point theory and metabolic adaptation. The more severe a caloric deficit, and more frequently a person diets, the worse your metabolic outcome. Your body will try to slingshot you back to your "original" weight (the one it's used to), with leptin as a regulator. But if you lose weight slowly, and leverage resistance training, it leads to a better outcome.
A prime issue is sustainability. Most people on a diet do succeed in losing weight; it's just that they gain it all back, and they can end up with a worse metabolic rate than they started with, making it that much harder to lose weight again. Metabolic rate can actually recover, but the length for this seems to depend on the severity. Assuming a slow rate of weight loss, it can take almost just as much time as the diet period to recover metabolic rate. For the "Biggest Loser" contestants, it took several years.
Leveraging the satiating and thermogenic effects of protein, fiber and resistant starch in diet also helps, for satiety.
All of which to say, it's possible to lose weight in a sustainable way without drugs - notwithstanding the failure rate. The people who succeed in doing so are not necessarily "more disciplined", or "less prone to hunger", but they tend to have certain behaviors in common. One of them is exercise (particularly resistance training).