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Comment by meindnoch | Hacker News Reader

Americans believe diet and exercise "doesn't work". The reasons are twofold: on one hand, this is coming from the fat acceptance / body positivity movement, which needs people to believe that diet and exercise are futile, and being fat is just a fact of life, like being tall or short. They want people to believe that being fat is a disability, or even an attribute of diversity that we ought to accept and celebrate. On the other hand, American food products make it unnecessarily hard to consistently meet your caloric deficit, which makes people wrongly conclude that diet and exercise just doesn't work.

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> On the other hand, American food products make it unnecessarily hard to consistently meet your caloric deficit, which makes people wrongly conclude that diet and exercise just doesn't work.

As an American who lost 100+ pounds & kept it off for more than a decade ... this x1000. It is extraordinarily difficult to maintain a healthy diet in the US.

This comes up a lot, and exercise and diet surely do work. But the notion of set points is also real and well studied. Once you become overweight and especially obese, your body does all sorts of crazy things to try and maintain that weight. Modulating the metabolism, sleepiness, energy levels etc. The percentage of people who have been obese and returned permanently to a healthy weight through diet and exercise is small enough that if it were a drug, people wouldn't even try it.

People talked about glp drugs moving the set point, I don't know of any research supporting that. It seems like stopping the drug usually adds the weight back. And they are not without risks. But obesity is worse.

You are spot on about American food products. They are calorie rich and nutrient poor. But the obesity problem has spread outside America now. I read one journal article suggesting the spread pattern was more like what you see with the introduction of an unrecognized dangerous chemical, or even a mildly contagious pathogen. Whether it is some odd gut biome pathogen, a weird food additive, or if the chemical is how we grow food itself, the problem isn't contained.

> on one hand, this is coming from the fat acceptance / body positivity movement, which needs people to believe that diet and exercise are futile

I think it's much more about people not really understanding how their bodies work. Losing the first few pounds on a diet is easy because it's water weight you drop as soon as you stop constantly eating sugar (soda, snacks, etc). Actually losing fat is much harder because it requires actual caloric reduction in your diet.

Many people starting diets have no idea how their body will lose weight and get disheartened when the second ten pound loss is way harder and takes longer than the first ten pounds. People will justify all sorts of things when they're desperate and disillusioned.

Also: the human body does not want to lose weight.

You get more hungry after exercise.

People also are bad at calorie counting because they forget about so many sources of calories (milk/sugar in coffee, snacks, etc).

Let's say you figure all that out - keeping to a consistent diet and exercise regime is hard without some structure to maintain it. Example: I was in super good shape when my gym was next to my office, and lots of coworkers would go work out with me.

All this before we get to the as-yet-not understood effects of ultra processed foods and microplastics.

The body positivity movement I would give next to 0 blame here. May as well blame wokeism.

>Also: the human body does not want to lose weight.

Sure. The human body doesn't want a lot of things. The human body doesn't want to go to school, and yet we do. The human body doesn't want to go to work, and yet we do. The human body doesn't want to hold back farts in the office, and yet we do.

Many things require willpower. Life is not a gradient descent.

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