Incel culture focuses a lot on height / unalterable genetics, which I can at least somewhat understand, but weight just doesn’t seem to have the same level of impact.
I don’t know, I could be totally wrong here. Would love to hear differing opinions.
Obviously (1) you choose what to eat and (2) if you eat little enough then you will get thin, and if you eat enough then you will get fat.
(But also: (a') you choose what to do and (2') if you never do anything that violates your values then you will be some sort of saint. But most people are not any sort of saint: we sometimes do hurtful things even though we think we shouldn't, or stay up later than is good for us, etc.)
But our bodies and brains are evolution-designed to make very sure we don't accidentally starve to death. So we feel hunger, and hunger is very difficult for us to ignore. And if something is miscalibrated so that the level of calorie intake at which you stop feeling hungry is enough to make you fat, then you will either get fat or feel constantly hungry.
And even if nothing is miscalibrated in that particular way, human brains are annoyingly good at acquiring habits that are difficult to break even when they are bad for us.
All of which means that while anyone can in principle keep themselves neither too thin nor too fat, according to whatever standards they find appropriate for that, doing so is much much more difficult for some people than for others, and if a thing is difficult enough to do and requires doing all the time I think it is no longer reasonable to say that doing or not doing it is "entirely in your control".
Calories in/calories out is simple, but not easy. People who feel hungry fail at maintaining their diets long term. We do not have less willpower or discipline than people in the 1970s, yet so many people are overweight now. Even wealthy people with serious resources remain overweight. This points to a systemic problem, not merely personal failing.
Hmm this is a fair point. Anecdotally, do you know the percentage of fitness coaches that weren’t able to get rid of their increased weight?
I have the unreasonable inclination to try this for myself in order to experience what it’s like.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fendo.2012.0002...
One way to think about it is that certain behaviors are more controllable in the short term than in the long term. An extreme example would be breathing, which, like eating behavior, the brain subconsciously regulates by default. You can override the default and intake substantially more or less oxygen for a while. In the end, though, you will revert to to subconscious regulation and your blood oxygen level will revert to the level where your brain wants it to be.
Eating behavior seems to work in a similar way, although the timeline is much longer and the cues are more subtle.
Most weight loss has more to do with hormone triggering than calories, but the main way to trigger those hormones is in fact diet and exercise, but it begs the questions; what kinds of diets and what kinds of exercise and what other things can affect this (things like time of day, fasted state, timing of exercise to eating, macro nutrients etc).
Also most people who are overweight or who overeat it's hard to tell how much is due to something like poverty and how much is due to poor emotional regulation, as it's been shown those are higher leading causes of obesity than merely overreating or being lazy.
Interestingly, many of the same neurological pathways are overactive in drug users and in obese people.