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I'm overweight and I blame myself for eating too much and not getting enough exercise.

There is some possibility that you eat too much because you are fat. It goes something like this, (details are surely wrong, but just so you get the idea. Google gary taubes for more info):

1. Your body is expecting a certain amount of calories at any point during the day which is either being pumped into your bloodstream from your fat or food in your gut.

2. Your fat doesn't work right, (probably because you eat too many carbs), and doesn't release enough calories, so you get hungry.

3. You keep over eating until you have enough volume of fat so that even though your fat doesn't work as well at releasing calories into your bloodstream, you make up for it by just having more.

4. Voila, you have reached homeostasis. Your body conspires to keep you at this weight. You are either hungry and thin or full and fat.

As for exercise, well, I can only offer up a personal anecdote. I lost 50 pounds. At first by starving myself with a calorie deficit and now I've figured out how to keep the weight off with the food I eat. (I no longer calorie count -- hooray).

During this period of weight loss I attempted to increase the amount I exercised to speed the process along. It didn't work. The only thing that moved the scale was either counting calories or eating a low carb diet, (paleo to be exact). If I had it to do over I'd just start with changing the things I eat, although because of years of calorie counting I'm now very aware of what I put in my mouth -- a good habit to have.

Edit: I do actually believe exercise can help you lose weight. I am currently training to race bikes. I go for very long rides (3-4 hours twice a week) to train my body to burn fat. This is critical for endurance sports. But I don't think it's realistic to ask everyone to become an endurance athlete.

I'm not saying it's easy, discipline is as tough as you just described. I run every other day for at least 30 minutes, and I try to eat healthy.

I have weighed more, and i have weighed less. Not morbidly obese, but my doctor would prefer I dropped 20. I have found stress is a factor.

Try spending some time carefully defining "eat healthy." I know plenty of people that are skinny and don't really have any discipline about what they eat which flies in the face of "fat people are just lazy." Skinny people are lazy too! I think they have something different in their genes that lets them handle a modern diet better than I do. So I simply don't eat a modern diet -- voila, weight lost. The last 10 pounds came off without counting a single calorie and eating as much as I wanted. Not joking.

(Friendly HN advice: if you want to lose weight, have a read of Liam Rosen's guide[1], I personally recommend it. Running isn't the most effective way to do it.)

http://www.liamrosen.com/fitness.html

This guide is the most concise and bginner friendly introduction to an active lifestyle I have seen yet... I second the recommendation... additionally (sad as it is) I think a lot of "professionals" would also benefit from reading it.

I hope that if you eat the right things, it isn't a matter of discipline. As Taubes writes in his book, you can eat carbs indefinitely, but eating arbitrary amounts of fat and proteine is much harder - at some point the body says no.

Carbs are supposedly "habit forming", they make you crave more carbs sooner.

If you were the only one I wouldn't think otherwise―but obesity is now a worldwide problem (well, at the moment solely in more economically developed areas).

Ultimately it's up to the individual to control how much they eat and exercise, but we've been misinformed for decades (and still, to this day!) on how to live healthily. The reason obesity has become an epidemic is surely due, at least in part, to this.

The secret is to stop driving and walk/cycle more.

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