| > I don't understand why some people can't escape the "addiction" of overeating unhealthy food, let alone too much of it, and others can escape the throes of drug dependency. [...] What could be so alien about someone like me compared against my own father, as opposed to his being in an active refusal to try? Well, addiction is a difficult thing. Most people with a serious addiction will never be able to overcome it. A small number of people will have the willpower to get through the withdrawal and engulfing suffering related to it. > it all seems to me like the issue isn't one of avoiding pain so much as refusing not to experience constant cheap pleasure People that are addicted to food, cocaine, or alcohol don't want to be addicted to it. They hate their constant urges. When I was at my worst I didn't want to eat the food I was eating. But fighting that urge requires a monumental amount of willpower people often simply don't have. It's not a "willpower deficiency" just as we wouldn't call a normal person willpower-deficient if they couldn't kick a cocaine addiction. > once it comes time to do the hard work of rejecting harmful habits all the cheap fun imagining the future disappears and they quit, simply ignoring all the downsides by trying to embrace even more pleasure. Yeah, they give up - which to me is completely unsurprising given how hard losing weight and kicking that addiction is for some people. See, given how addicted you are to food, a diet plan could range from merely "hard work" to "so ridiculously hard that your psychology can't handle it". This is why I think medicines like Ozempic are critical. They enable you to lose weight without needing to exercise Herculean feats of willpower if you are very addicted to food (especially if you have been since childhood.) |
Exercising the willpower to not eat when you're hungry is only a Herculean effort if you've stopped exercising it regularly for a long time.
At any given moment, we might have multiple conflicting desires (e.g. "I want to eat this pizza," and "I want to lose weight"), and it takes a lot of mental practice to be able notice when this is happening, and take a moment to identify which of your wants are base urges and which are real, higher-order desires, then align your actions with the higher-order ones. Meditation helps, and for those that really struggle with exercising executive function, therapy can help as well. But it takes a lot of practice and sustained effort. Habits change quite slowly and most of the work of losing weight is building the right mental frameworks so that you can start changing habits. Trying to brute force weight loss is like trying to swim the English channel with no training - you're going to fail and might hurt or even traumatize yourself in the process, which will make it even harder if you try again later.
Medication does work and it has its place, but because it comes with side effects and does not resolve the underlying mental issues that are driving the addictive behavior, I really do feel it should be a last resort for the most serious cases of addiction, not the first line of attack. It's possible you and I may agree on this point, but many don't, and refusing to acknowledge that obesity is primarily a psychological issue is doing more harm than good.