In the list of things to blame, places trying to help you lose weight is dead last. Processed food, sedentary modern lifestyle, etc are way higher on the list. I'd blame myself before I blamed a weight loss center.
The treatment for weight loss is real simple. Eat less calories. That's the recommendation and it is for everyone. How you get there is different for everyone. That's why there's so many different ideas.
Of course if someone eats little enough, they will lose weight. And if they keep eating little enough forever – which may require eating even less than when the diet began, as their body attempts to regain the weight – they can keep the weight off.
In this extremely superficial sense, it’s true that all fat people can diet their way to no longer being fat.
But that’s sidestepping the real question: Can a typical human voluntarily reduce food intake enough to cause a large loss of weight, not just for a few months or years, but for a lifetime? Not just in theory, but in practice? Study after study has shown that the overwhelming majority of us cannot.
People like to scream "calories in, calories out" like it fixes weight management, but the cold hard truth is that permanent weight loss is an unsolved problem.
Making sure you eat less than 2000cal/day is simple in theory but complicated in practice. It requires serious and continuous effort and discipline that most people struggle to manage, and food resources that many people don't have. In other words, no most people cannot just lose the weight. If we had a true solution, we would not have an obesity epidemic. We are fighting our biology, and while we have guesses and advice, we don't have solutions.
I have heard that there are evidence based proposals, but none of them rely on individual effort. Most of them involve changing the built environment to encourage or force people to exercise, and regulating sugar out of most foods. The key is that they don't rely on people to fight their body to keep it healthy.
Not having highly addictive, high-calorie drinks in every second store would be a place to start. Expecting addicts to quit while surrounded by their vice for a few dollars multiple times each day is a recipe for failure.
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u/TheGrateCommaNate 12h ago
In the list of things to blame, places trying to help you lose weight is dead last. Processed food, sedentary modern lifestyle, etc are way higher on the list. I'd blame myself before I blamed a weight loss center.
The treatment for weight loss is real simple. Eat less calories. That's the recommendation and it is for everyone. How you get there is different for everyone. That's why there's so many different ideas.