If you can, I'd recommend watching "Fed Up" [0], a documentary which tries to show that the problem is a bit more complex than just people being lazy ("light" food being effectively worse, complete lack of food education, lobbying at it's worse etc). As many documentaries, it has a rather clear agenda, but it's interesting nonetheless.
I remember a scene about a mother going to the store, and buying 'light' oreos/chips/other stuff, and giving that to their kids instead of the regular ones to their kids and then complaining he didn't lose weight and taking as a conclusion that 'dieting' and 'exercise' doesn't really work. Never considered that maybe a carrot stick or an apple would be better, she would just buy diet soda/cookies/chips.
This is very much the same as for cigarettes, and why the "light" label on those has been banned for years.
But she made it in relation to the fact that for some categories (i.e. the US has had a constant increase in obesity for kids ages 2-5 which are not naturally not "sitting all day" types) moving more is not enough, and I felt the underlying points are still valid (school food is crap, adults are unable to understand what "healthy food", that "eat healthy" is not "eat less" etc).
I probably should have said "underestimated", please forgive a foreign speaker :)
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/may/07/news/la-heb-obesity-...
("Might be" because of In a news conference that was the centerpiece of a second annual "Weight of the Nation" conference in Washington, D.C., Finkelstein said it was unclear whether the galloping rate of growth has slowed because of public policy initiatives aimed at preventing child obesity, greater societal awareness of obesity's risks, or because Americans have hit the maximum level of fatness a population can sustain., that last bit would not be a success...)
You seem to consider the fact these percentages are "growing less" as a success, but in my eyes, it is a failure to implement drastic measures, so (IMHO) you'd be also underestimating the problem.
On the other end of it, you have the question of how far drastic measures can go and still be compatible with a reasonable society.
I was pointing at the change in the slope as evidence that the programs are (perhaps) having an effect, not that everything was all fixed and a great success. I'm perhaps optimistic, because I think countering obesity in children is the most important thing to be doing, and because I think that over time people will tend to learn habits that are useful in the face of food abundance (which is a reasonably recent phenomenon when you look at it in terms of generations).
I seem to be losing weight myself (I'm about 220 lbs.) very slowly, since my pants are starting to be loose. A few people around me have noticed that I have lost weight, at least around the middle.