[rrrrrrrrrrrryan]

Willpower is a muscle, though - if you don't flex it, it atrophies pretty quickly.

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.

[xvector]

> 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.

Addiction mechanics play a role here. It's not just willpower, it's willpower minus addiction. The second variable is absolutely massive, it snowballs over time, and it's why addiction treatments often have more interventions than just willpower.

As such, it's a thousand times more difficult for an obese person to "simply not eat" than it is for a normal person to "simply not eat." To the normal person, not addicted to food, it might seem simple, like the obese person simply lacks willpower, but in the obese person's shoes the normal person would likely end up the same way.

Hence, the obesity epidemic - it sneaks up on you.