this post was submitted on 06 May 2026
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I'm always baffled by the lack of curiosity around this subject. It's just blame the victim for being obese. Just eat less, bro! and then defend that viewpoint to the death. There never seems to be a point where the question comes up "I wonder why only in the last 30 years or so that the western world has seen this dramatic increase in obesity?" Can't be large food corporations making cheap unhealthy foods highly addictive. Can't be a significant reduction in nutrition education. Can't be a reduction in access to mental healthcare.
Nope. Just fatty goin' to be fat. Such a fucking lazy take.
There’s actually a phenomenon where Americans move abroad, and suddenly start losing a ton of weight. Not because they consciously changed their eating habits, but simply because the food that is available in the foreign stores and restaurants is healthier.
American grocery stores tend to prioritize convenience and unhealthy foods. You have to really search to find anything that is worthwhile, even when the store is packed full of food. There’s a ton of variety in American grocery stores, (Europeans are always baffled by the entire aisle dedicated to breakfast cereals), but basically none of it is healthy. So Americans naturally end up buying lots of unhealthy shit, simply because it’s all they realistically have access to.
But then that gets flipped on its head when those Americans move abroad. Suddenly, the stores they’re shopping at aren’t full of junk. And so they naturally start losing lots of weight. Many Europeans assume that Americans are simply complacent with their weight, but the reality is that the entire infrastructure surrounding them is singularly focused on keeping them fat.
Yes, also walking to the store, walking to work. I don't use my car much - arranged my life so that I can get everywhere I need to, mostly, without driving but that is unusual as fuck where I live, everyone else in my office arrives by car. I am not usually the only bike in the rack at the grocery but maybe 3, 4 bikes and a hundred cars in the lot. No bike rack at my doctors' offices, nor dentist, nor aesthetician. None at restaurants.
Walking a lot or even biking on e-bike everywhere like I do, makes a difference in what you can eat without getting fat. But also I cook at home, from ingredients, do make sweet stuff for the kids & husband but don't like it much myself. Grow some of our food, and lunch biggest meal.
I don't think it's impossible here, to have a reasonable lifestyle, I do it and am not an unusual person, not super rich or super ambitious or determined. I do think it's more difficult and you have to be intentional AND either be lucky (city grew up around me) or flush with money, to create a life that is the "fifteen minute bubble" with everything nearby.
So did I; unfortunately that means not having to leave my house. So I offset that with self-mandated walks and runs.
I actually made a comment about walking elsewhere in the thread, just a few minutes ago.
I saw that recently in a video about food in Japan. Japanese people going to Western countries and gaining like 25 pounds in a couple of months, then returning to Japan and shedding it within weeks.
Sugar content, portion size, nutrition vs empty calories and other factors...
I've noticed first hand the impact of environmental factors.
I moved from a place where I needed the car for EVERYTHING. This include taking off the garbage. Even going for a walk wasn't possible without taking the car first.
Most of the food I was eating was imported (mainly from the US). I was able to find few local fruits and vegetable but choices are quite limited and the supply erratic.
Then I moved back to France, I now live in a small village where everything is available at a walking or biking distance. School, work, small grocery shop, bakery, doctor, pharmacy, coworking space, kids activity. I'm might be using the car once a week now.
There is plenty of farmers in the area with local produces and even supermarkets have a wide selection of decent fruits and vegetables but I prefer the local producers as I can.
I stopped working out, I have not purposely changed my eating habits but without any surprise I am in a much, much better physical shape now.
This is something that can be difficult to convey to non-Americans. The go-to assumption is that Americans are just lazy and dislike walking. At my last apartment, it was literally illegal (and wildly dangerous) for me to realistically walk to my local grocery store. I had to cross a major highway to get there, and there were no sidewalks or crosswalks nearby.
If I wanted to drive to the store, it was a quarter mile. Half a mile for the round trip. Basically just across the highway. Go down to the end of my street, cross the highway, and arrive at the store. Easy.
If I wanted to legally walk to the grocery store, it would be a 16.5 mile round trip. Because the nearest pedestrian highway crossing was ~4 miles away. I’d have to go all the way down to that crossing, make the cross, then march all the way back to reach the store. And that also assumes that I’m going to be able to legally make it to the crossing… There were several sections between my apartment and the crossing that had no sidewalks, so I’d have to walk in the road for at least a mile in each direction. Here is a quick and dirty diagram to illustrate what I mean:
That’s ~8 and a quarter miles in one direction, not to mention the fact that I’d then have to take the same route back, with my arms full of grocery bags. Yeah, it’s no fucking wonder that I choose to drive instead.
4 miles between pedestrian crossings should be illegal. Here, though it's for sure a car city, the small roads that go under the stupid highway that bisects the city are about 1/2 mile apart. And where there is no sidewalk, on smaller roads, legal to walk in road, off to the side, facing traffic.
Not everyone even has a car. Or license.
Everything you mentioned, PLUS:
The list goes on.
The single most important thing everyone can do is take a walk. I make sure I do this rain or shine, even if it's down the block and back.
GLP-1 and other "weight lost methods" gain popularity in the US due to our population's proclivity of saying "I want x, but I don't want to change anything about me." In other words, "I want to lose weight but don't want to change my lifestyle."
Study after study has shown that slow, gradual, and intentional weight loss is healthier and will last longer than any fad, drug, or food plan.
Not only will your body naturally learn what it means to eat and be healthy, you'll actually feel better too.
One criticism of this analysis (which I think is mostly spot on) those GLP drugs help people change their lifestyle by turning off the 'food noise'. They don't, by themselves, make anyone lose weight. They help people who overeat be not hungry all the time so that they can eat better and work out more - it's the eating better and working out more that is causing the weight loss.
I've always been baffled by how people keep their weight off so easily. I live in a walkable city, love walking, walk everywhere as my primary means of transport, and frequently take 3-5km leisure walks multiple times a week. Yet I only ever seem to gain weight, it's beyond maddening. My meals are nothing outrageous either
Of course, my weight is the first thing my doctor points out every time like I'm not keenly aware of how much my body hates me...
Changing the framing can help from weight loss to health improvement.
You may always be overweight by health standards (BMI) but if your blood work is good, you're happy with how you are able to do the activities you like, you feel/are strong, you eat quality foods, and are mostly a happy person then I would say that you're successful.
If you're interested in what worked for me
Calorie counting is a good step. I'm not skinny because I have an active lifestyle, I'm skinny because I force myself to listen to my body in how much I put into it and when I give it more it's because it's telling me it's doing something good with it.Calorie counting helps you understand how much you're actually eating. After a week or two of it you can look up what your maintenance calories should be and create a general plan for how to get that much food in a day. The goal there is to learn what a healthy maintenance portion is and to get your body comfortable with it. Breaking a large meal into smaller plate sizes and only getting more after 10 minutes if you're still hungry is a great trick too.
Once you're no longer hungry all the time on maintenance you can start doing a cut (start with 500 deficit, don't exceed 1000). Have a goal weight and once you hit it maintain your controlled maintenance calories until it's instinctive.
Also, building muscle and more cardiovascular exercise are great additions to walking. Muscle burns more resting calories and is denser than fat, a good goal weight can look very different depending on how much muscle you carry.
I did try calorie counting and frequenting a gym when I was in college. I barely lost any weight and ended up more miserable because of the regimen, so I stopped. I really don't think it's a hunger thing either, I have ADHD and frequently skip meals unintentionally
I really don't know why my body just isn't receptive to anything and my bloodwork doesn't shine any lights
Yeah when I did my big loss it really sucked for like a month or two until my brain adjusted to the fact that I wasn't going to give it what it wanted. I'll also admit my big loss was not at a time where my mental state or material conditions were great, so it may have been more obsessive than most people are willing to engage in. And thats key here, the goal in life is to be happy and good, I'm happier skinnier and with an active lifestyle I have no judgment for those who find this process misery inducing and choose not to lose weight or look for alternative means of doing so.
You have adhd you mentioned, so do I. So firstly, actually getting my adhd properly treated is vital, I can't maintain good eating habits when unmedicated because I lack structure and willpower.
But also, do you eat out of boredom? And have you tried making food in your home inconvenient to snack on. I have to do that sometimes, especially making food that's easy to snack on out of the way. I've also found starting with a seltzer or gum helpful between meals. Aside from stuff like that, putting half what you expect to eat for your meal on your plate then waiting a bit after finishing before deciding if you want the other half is something else I've found helpful.
I'll try the half plate tip, thanks :) Seltzer is the main thing my partner and I drink. We have a sodastream we use heavily (no syrups)
Good luck!
What serious person says it's just fatty being fat?
They can be found in the "never had any issues with weight control/I'm always forgetting to eat/I ate a small bag of chips so I'm not hungry" crowd
I mean to be fair there's also other reasons to forget to eat (AuDHD gang here, haha)
(we DO get hungry though, and then just... still don't eat. executive dysfunction is a fuck)
-- Frost
Just eat less? Golly, why didn't I think of that? So simple!
Also if you have basically an addiction to food, this is like telling a drug addict "just use less heroin!" And the survival rate of withdrawals from stopping cold turkey with food is approximately 0%. So you will be managing that addiction for your entire life.
Well at least part of the "addictive" part of food addiction is sugar, and that you can absolutely ditch.
Do you mean added sugar? Because cutting out fruit and veg from your diet is pretty unhealthy.
It's possible to cut out sugar, yes. But also keep in mind sugar is literally everywhere and the cheapest easiest food substance to access. It's on every menu, it's at the check out counter of every store, it's offered for free by coworkers bringing in treats or birthday cakes, offered in bowls at the exit from some restaurants or other businesses, it's thrown out at parades, given away on Halloween, etc. It's possible to avoid eating sugar, but avoiding temptation is basically impossible if you have a habit of leaving your home to work or shop. If you are addicted to sugar, it's a constant struggle.
I'm addicted to Tostito's queso. Of course I know it's horrible for me. At least it'll be a queso OD, instead of "horse".
"pEOple WeRe jUsT mORe ActiVe iN thE PasT"
I call bullshit. Like sure, in the early 1900's and before, people were more active. But in the 60's, 70's, and 80's? We had cars. People still used them a lot instead of walking. People still chose to sit and watch TV, or read, or listen to music. People still worked in offices and spent the majority of their day sitting. The average number of steps between a person back then and today is really not that different. Maybe a bit higher, but no where even fucking close to explaining the obesity epidemic.
Claims that the extreme increase in obesity is simply due to increased sedentary lifestyle just fucking reeks of lobbied attempts to shift the blame from the real problem.
It's the food, stupid. High-volume processed bullshit with low-cost additives and filler ingredients SWARMED the shelves and replaced nearly every good product with unhealthy convenience with a longer shelf-life. Our portion sizes didn't even change that much, it's just the quality of what we're eating has dropped tremendously.
You can't even fully escape it by trying to only buy fresh food. Modern fruits and vegetables have been bred to be full of sugars and starches. Raw chicken is pumped full of salt and preservatives, sometimes making up more than 30% of its weight.
They are poisoning people and then blaming them for the consequences.
100%.
The French are still relatively skinny for exactly that reason; the food is in general much less processed and the rules are very strict. As a North American who lives there, I've lost weight just by being here.
I am going to take this opportunity to shit on car culture. Walking several miles a week because I live in a walkable city is pleasant, and almost certainly good for my health and weight.
I don't have objections to the rest of your post. I just hate car culture.
Oh totally agree with car culture. Walkable cities are fantastic. But again, it's not like cities were more walkable in the 60's, 70's, and 80's. Hell, if anything, cities have become MORE walkable in recent decades than they were back then.
As someone whose body doesn’t make enough dopamine, food is one of the few things that gives me the hit I need to keep going consistently. There’s enough variety that in my almost forty years on this earth I haven’t found an end to what I enjoy.
So yes, I’m fat and I eat too much, but for me it’s better than being miserable.