Most advice is right for the person giving it

The real solution to weight loss (especially in the U.S.) is to change the social norms. When everyone is hitting the buffets and going to Cheesecake Factory and buying high calorie garbage at a discount, of course to population gets fat. France, for example, makes all of that much harder. Maybe Ozempic will help reduce the Walmart-wheelchair-fat population, but truly becoming fit as a country requires significantly more friction for everyone.

Not everyone knows this and many who do can't afford an expensive farm to table whole foods diet.

Now toss in car culture and the suburban model and a culture very strongly against any sort of socialized commons like public trans and the little exercise they otherwise would get isn't available anymore. I live in a walkable neighborhood and take public trans, I know my health would be much worse if I didn't get all those steps, fresh air, sense of community, etc in everyday.

Pretty much everything Americans do is wrong when it comes to food, diet, walkable communities, and transportation. What we need to fix this is not putting everyone on ozempic, but a frank look at how our society is organized and figuring out ways to move to a saner society.

Ah yes, our old friend starvation.

War and famine? And no Haber-Bosch process.

> because people as a whole are incredibly intolerant to any friction in their lives

...somehow makes me picture you saying it with a smug expression and instantly dislike the whole comment. Maybe it's the broad, catch-all "because people" generalisation, I don't know. But again, I agree with the comment... in meaning ;(

And as a bonus, now they also have one. A lot of people didn't even believe that was the solution though, and the belief change is important.

Don't underestimate how impossible it can be to force your own body into a new behavior pattern.

Exercising is great, absolutely, but eating less is the actual primary method. While acknowledging complications of metabolism and psychology and weird states body goes through when it's hungry, primary part is to reduce calory intake vs expenditure.

So as snide and silly as it may be, in my neck of the woods, I would agree, lots of people don't believe eating less is the primary method of losing weight.

Fasting does too, for that matter.

Paleo is just trendy keto with some woo on top.

The don't use the same mechanism as glp, nor do they have same success rate, but similar idea.

Eliminating sugar makes it harder to consume a 64oz soda at 800 calories in 3 minutes and still be hungry.

Anywho, most diets achieve some weight-loss.

But! keeping your mind and body from demanding you eat more to return to homeostasis is actually the 2nd hard part, and the part that most people fail at. And we'll see how much glp losses are sustainable (without shots) here pretty soon.

Regardless, this technology is good and we should subsidize everyone getting to a healthy weight. Searching for reasons they are actually morally inferior or stupid is counterproductive.

It certainly works, it is just an unhelpful strategy.

People who do keto, paleo, eliminating sugar, vegan or whatnot do this as a strategy for eating less, through a variety of mechanisms, generally some combination of attempting to stabilize blood sugar to forestay cravings, eating fewer meals, or eating less calorie dense foods (you have to eat a lot of vegetables to get fat!)

It's kind of like saying "Smoke less to avoid lung cancer". You can say eating is a fatal addiction. If you stop you die. The hard part is is balancing it so you keep on living and avoid the negative health outcomes.

Why is this hard? First the cause and effect are separated by a lot of time. If I eat a sweet fat sugary treat I get the good feeling RIGHT NOW. The negative health effects are way later.

Other reasons it's hard is our eating habits are mostly created in our childhood and very hard to break as an adult. If your parents fed you poorly you're at a significant health disadvantage.

The last one I'll list is crap food marketing. The most unhealthy crap seems to have the brightest packages to catch our eye. It has huge amounts of salt, fat, and sugar, things our evolutionary body craves because the number one thing it wants to avoid is starvation.

So yea, it is reachable, but it is not trivial at all.

Many people don’t understand what the high calorie drivers in their diet are, many wildly mis-estimate how much they’re eating, most people inflate the weight loss impacts of training and neglect the appetite rebounds, and the interplay between insulin and appetite and how to manage satiety signals is voodoo for even a lot of doctors. Availability of proper food and time to prepare it are hurdles on top of hurdles.

My estimation is that a lot of people are using way, way, more energy and willpower in their ‘diet’ cycles than necessary but tragically getting poor results because of miscalibration. Our society is geared around profitable food delivery, not healthy dietary wisdom.

Suffering comes not from "dieting" but from not knowing calorie math and using too big of a deficit!

Run too big of a deficit = become miserable = blame dieting and stop halfway. Simply pick a deficit you can continue for long; it's the solution! Average woman may have TDEE around 1800-2000, she can eat 1700-1600kcal comfortably.

You know that if i remove 150kcal from your diet, your wouldn't notice? that's like 2 slices of bread. So the hunger suppression will never be a question for vast majority of fat people

150kcal deficit over a year = 7.1kg or 15.6 lbs lost! and 300kcal = 31.2lbs or 14.2kg!! all this without any injection or drug without any exercise or severe loss of lean masss

When carbs spike their blood sugar, insulin swoops in to convert the excess glucose into fat. When they try to restrict calories, they focus on cutting the wrong macros. Calories from carbs are hard to avoid and easily miscounted/underestimated unless you're literally weighing the food and know every ingredient used.

You're not even wrong that women are more likely to have a sweet tooth and fall for crap diets like "low fat" or "plant based". It's decades of evil marketing at play here. The result is not only that they stay fat, but then lose muscle and the number on the scale doesn't budge.

You know what's a whole lot easier to eyeball and get full on? Meat and veg you cooked yourself. That's the easiest solution by miles, but people will continue serving themselves way too much pasta and bread (because it looks right on the plate), adding sauces that are smuggling even more carbs, eating ultraprocessed junk loaded with sugar you can't even taste or filler carbs to cut production cost, and saying their occasional piece of "fun size" candy or favorite drink "doesn't count".

1. Different bodies have different abilities to digest different things. For example, you could eat every bit as much grass as a cow that's gaining weight, and you would lose weight (and eventually starve to death). Obviously the variation within humans is less than that between humans and cows, but it's silly to pretend that we all share identical gut biomes and identical abilities to process foods with the same efficiencies. From this, it clearly follows that some people are going to get more calories out of the same food than others.

2. Even ignoring inclination to exercise, people have different resting heart rates and body temperatures. It obviously costs more calories to heat your body to a higher temperature and for your heart to beat faster, so some people are naturally going to gain or lose weight at a caloric intake that keeps other people at the same weight.

You can argue that these differences are minor, at the margins, and unlikely to mean the difference between equilibrium and weight change, and you might be right, but it's silly to pretend that they're physically impossible because of thermodynamics. The human stomach isn't a bomb calorimeter, which is why you can't drink a liter of gasoline and skip eating for a few days.

What's more annoying is claiming all fat people have a common thinking pattern.

Some fat people may think about food all time, but most don't.

There you go, I just made life much simpler for you.

There is an interesting effect in weight loss, but it applies to so many more things. That is when a lot of people diet they record particular things like how much they ate at a meal, but not how much they snacked. When you have a third party observer record everything that observer gets a much different calorie intake amount than the person dieting.

This is also true for almost any human claim that is not backed up by outside observation. We do all kinds of things subconsciously. We cut out any information that may look bad. The words we say have huge amounts of assumptions build in for 'us' but may not apply to anyone else on the planet. This is why science quite commonly finds reality is in direct opposition to how our minds think it works.

I honestly think this is some fundamental limit of single observer based intelligence.

Personally I've always greatly preferred self-guided learning. I never really did great with strict coursework, and instead have done a lot better when I am given more abstract lessons that I play with.

I'm a pretty weird dude, and I have no problem acknowledging that; it's possible that a lot of (most?) people do better with the more structured learning.

You have a right to your trauma after all.

Perhaps you can interpret Jobs' statement that way in a vacuum, but fortunately we don't need to evaluate what Jobs' said in a vacuum. He also said a lot of other things that allow us to build up context around his intent. He spoke a lot about how he found his love.