This is too absolutist. People aren't immutable, unable to control themselves at all without drugs. Anyone who gives up smoking without a patch has to decide to never pick up a cigarette again. They may have "given up" a few times before, and the last time they succeeded. By your logic they shouldn't have tried more than once.
> But if we check back after five or 10 years, there's a good chance they will have put the weight back on. Only about five per cent of people who try to lose weight ultimately succeed, according to the research. Those people are the outliers, but we cling to their stories as proof that losing weight is possible.
> In a meta-analysis of 29 long-term weight loss studies, more than half of the lost weight was regained within two years, and by five years more than 80% of lost weight was regained.
"Just eat right and exercise more" may work for a small number of people, but for most it's setting folks up to fail. It's good that we're starting to get medication options that can help folks achieve those changes; bariatric surgery works, but it's a big deal for the body.
Bariatric surgery also tends to require a period of weight loss beforehand as well as extensive behavior modification afterward. These new drugs should make that process much easier.
Well, to be clearer, the first is just an article, but it talks about obese people, not all people. That's what I mean. Obese people are not all people, and studies of weight loss in obesity are on a few obese people.
Take a 'large enough' population of animals and give them an all you can eat buffet for months. What percentage of them becomes overweight? It won't be 100%, but the numbers should be pretty high. I have a very strong feeling (sadly no evidence, they won't let me trap random people in cages for months at a time to test this) that the human numbers and the animal numbers will look very much alike.
My what? I was countering an absolutist position; I wasn't presenting my own.
And yes, animals can be made to starve to death as well, if you give them a bar to push that gives a dopamine hit. That doesn't mean we should shrug and say, "Well, it's inevitable that I'm going to die now, because I failed once" the first time we fail to refrain from getting such a hit.
