[seabird]

People want to eat to excess because they're psychologically/emotionally rewarded for doing so, because eating whatever and whenever you could was pretty fucking important for tens of thousands of years before we had infinite McDonald's and microwave dinners.

Eating less and exercising more does work. Talk to dedicated lifters about their cutting/bulking, where they want to be, and talk to them about it again in six months if you want to see how effective it is. It doesn't work for a lot of people because in the short, medium, and arguably even long term, it doesn't make you feel good.

There are a handful of people that can struggle to gain or lose weight on a diet appropriate for the amount of exercise they do. You may be one of them. If you are one of those people, asking why other people struggle with it is like being a 6'6" basketball player and wondering why somebody who is 5'9" struggles to dunk like you can.

[ericd]

Yep, of course you lose weight if you starve yourself. But why do so many people seem to have a natural eating “setpoint” that fattens them, and others don’t? My guess is that it’s largely the types of foods they’re eating. Not fatty ones, which have been vilified (like I said, my food mix includes a lot of whole milk, cheese, and other very fatty food), but ones that mess with their digestion and satiety signals. For example, if you drink sweet drinks, they make you hungrier. I’m pretty sure if I eat more McDonald’s and microwave dinners rather than the simple foods I generally eat, I’ll fatten right up, and I’ll join in the ranks of those that crave more food than needed.

[seabird]

>Yep, of course you lose weight if you starve yourself

There is a massive difference between being at a calorie deficit and starving yourself. I don't even know what to say -- this horse has been beaten to death by countless thousands of people and it's wild that anecdotal evidence with a sample size of you is enough to justify theorizing an alternative to an incredibly simple idea that until a few generations ago, there was absolutely no evolutionary pressure to not want to eat everything you can.

[ericd]

Sorry for the hyperbole. I think you're being a bit uncharitable, though, I'm of course not basing this entirely on myself. Lots of people I know have a bar for being satiated that maintains weight without effort. But many clearly do not. Is it obvious why some do, and some don't? It's clearly not down to willpower.

I suppose you'd say that some areas experienced more evolutionary pressure to eat as much as possible than others due to differences in food security?

But being hungry/unsatiated is distracting and can decrease your performance on every other task you do, so I don't really agree that there's no counterpressure. And I doubt that people in even those less food secure regions are just hungry all the time, like some obese people here describe being. It really seems like something just gets messed up in the signalling, which makes it seem more like a health problem/malfunction than some built-in evolutionary drive that doesn't fit the modern world.