this post was submitted on 06 May 2026
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wait a minute... are you reallly saying all these studies come to the conclusion that "weight loss is just a myth" rather than the much more likely scenario of "this many people simply refuse to give up pastries, pasta, and fried food"
i can see how big pharma would love more $tudies like this, but i'm not fucking buying the "if you're fat, it's not because of anything you did"
edit: LOL in other words, human beings, the only mammals that stuff their face with donuts, bagels, and pancakes and calls it "breakfast" are also the only species that has an epidemic (mostly in america) of morbid obesity that no one can do anything about, short of GLP. riiiiiight....
How do you feel about "abstinence only" sex education? You know, people can just choose not to have sex right? And how well does that work?
lol are you really arguing against that sentence?
i think i'm done with this whole thread. nice talking to you all
Yeah - you just want to slut and fat shame people while feeling superior. Best you leave the convo anyway.
You do not understand what happens to hunger regulation.
The human body fundamentally don't have a concept of too much fat. It only really has a concept of "close to the highest fat mass we've had" or "below highest". It keeps recalibrating for your new highest and will make you want to eat more until you get back there. That's it's mechanism to drive you to avoid starvation, because it doesn't know what "overweight" is.
Any long term treatment needs to focus on that regulation mechanism and recalibrate it down. We don't know how to do that yet, all we can do is silence the hunger or change absorption.
i mean yea, i'm sure a lot of people would rather blame hunger and say "i have no control over what i put in my mouth" than actually start limiting the intake of garbage food all day every day. but it's still a false dichotomy. people absolutely CAN decide not to eat, even when they feel like they're "starving"-- find me the studies that show how many people have died because they skipped a meal or two?
You're being purposely obtuse. If you believe addiction is a disease, then overeating is also a disease. We have drugs and research guided methods to help deal with both. If its cruel to force addicts to quit cold turkey, then its also true of forcing clinically overweight patients to entirely change their lifestyle. (All the while being vocally judged and mocked)
Most of these people have tried losing weight through diet and exercise and want to get better, but as the other commenter has mentioned, their mind and body works against them. That's also ignoring the societal conditions pushing us all to calorically dense, quick-n-easy meals and a working schedule that doesn't allow us much free time to exercise.
As a disclosure, I am 6'0" and 200lbs. Down 30lbs from 3-4 years ago using strictly diet and exercise. BUT I'm also an athletic trainer and my office is in a gym I can use for free.
You have absolutely no idea how difficult it is to eat correctly when your body screams at you that it's wrong. Starvation is used as a torture method, and deliberate unassisted weight loss triggers the exact same regulatory reaction in the body even if you're not actually starving, because the body only sees "loss of fat levels".
i thought we were leaving personal experience and anecdotal evidence out of the discussion, but since you brought it up-- yes i do know. last year i went from 230 lb (my heaviest ever) down to 180 lb. due to other health issues in addition to being way fatter than i'm comfortable with, i decided to eat better at the least, if not always "correctly." i drastically reduced the junk, sugar, and ultraprocessed food, and did IF (poorly). those few changes brought me from a size 38 pants down to 34.
i love pizza, donuts, french fries, bacon cheeseburgers, and all the other stuff just as much as anyone. no it's not easy to cut back on those things, and i know the pain of choosing an apple over potato chips. but i'll say it again (and again and again): "not easy" does NOT equal impossible, and removing agency and responsibility from people is the opposite of helpful
That's an exceptionally ironic response to scientific studies pointing mapping out the chemical processes behind the above. You're just desperately trying to justify feeling better than others.
Some people can drop severe drug addictions on their own. Most can't. Do you treat ex addicts that way too? Tell them it's agency and responsibility when their fucked up chemical response messes with their head?
If you actually wanted to help others, you'd spend less time condemning people you don't know and spend more time figuring out why they have problems
i mean, if you're addicted to heroin, then at some point you're going to have to make the conscious decision to quit. methadone, rehab, interventions--yea all that stuff can help, but it's not going to replace people having to make decisions about whether they want to go back to the drugs again
if you insist you're powerless, then i guess you are. best of luck to you
Well if you've looked into this at all you'd see people CANNOT. Hypothetically people can, but in reality, people can only lose weight short term and then they gain it back.
You're arguing a point that has no evidence beyond "well I personally think it SHOULD work like this!"
This attitude is the problem, yep.
There's no other medical condition which only 0.8% of people ever recover from where we tell people to just keep trying treatments that we know don't work.
An individual's behaviour is a contributing factor in most diseases. But the hormones, social factors, etc. which determine that behaviour are beyond the control of willpower. GLP1s work because they treat the hormonal imbalances which cause the behaviour that causes weight loss.
We don't tell people they're pathetic for catching a cold, though our social organization put them in a place where their biological weakness to that disease was triggered.
I am not downplaying the psychological effects of obesity but....Willpower is quite literally the ability to overcome your hormones/emotion and resist social pressure. It IS all you need, it's just really hard to learn. Especially nowadays with the societal pressure to be hot and how depressing the world is in general.
Comparing obesity to a cold is a false dichotomy as you most people can't simply avoid asymptomatic carriers. But if you insist on the comparison, we were absolutely vicious to people who got COVID because they chose to not wear masks (and rightfully so). I'm not suggesting we SHOULD be similarly mean to fat people, though.
I want to reiterate I'm not looking down on anyone for having weak willpower, mine is shit when there's a sweet treat in front of me. But I lost 5kg last year just by practicing at the grocery store. If there's junk food in my house, I know I'll pick it over real food every time. So I choose not to buy it.
"social factors" = "i have NO CHOICE but to eat this pie because everyone else is"
LOL ok bud.
nice talking
edit: i have to be honest: i too would love to adopt the stance of "i ate 5000 calories yesterday and it's everyone and everything else's fault except for mine," and everyone's free to believe that, or whatever they choose. but i'll never sit here and say that's a valid argument, or that weight loss is a "myth." no, it's not easy, but "not easy" does NOT equal impossible, and my opinion is that making such claims is dishonest and harmful
No, social factors like the price of processed vs healthy food, the amount of sugar and salt companies are allowed put in food specifically to addict consumers, the food our culture uses to celebrate, the stressors and social pressures that we know drive people towards dopamine sources like high caloric foods, cities designed to discourage walking, etc.
Edit: no one's claiming what you're saying. Individual behaviour is a factor in most disease. Focusing on the individual behaviour piece has proved to be completely ineffective at producing weightloss. That's just a fact. And yet we keep doing it like it's suddenly going to work. It won't. You could tell people not to go to work in winter so they don't catch a cold, but they won't do that.
Plus highly engineered garbage designed to fuel addiction. But it's not impossible. I'm not paying $8 for 3lbs Mandarins; but I'll pay $4 for 3 lbs of naval oranges.
Eating less donuts is cheaper than eating more donuts. If price is your motivator, I have good news for you!
Okay, but hear me out, have you tried this pie? It's delicious!