[grayhatter]

So if understanding the equation about how humans can obtain and maintain a healthy diet/weight is as simple as you present here. Why doesn't everybody just do that?

You say yourself, it couldn't not work. And yet there's hundreds of thousands of people that say it didn't work. Explain them, are they lying?

I'd assert, the oversimplified explanation is misleading. It's only true in the same way that drinking cold water will help you lose more weight than warm water. True or not, reality seems to strongly suggest it's irrelevant

[rybosworld]

> Explain them, are they lying?

Yes.

[grayhatter]

It's more likely that hundreds of thousands of people are collectively lying, than it is that trying to find a solution that works for hundreds of thousands of different humans all with different needs, lifestyles, desires, capabilities, and understanding, might be a tad more complicated than just counting intake calories?

[pugets]

Why assume people will do what’s in their own long-term best interests, especially after being presented with a short-term thrill?

Pizza tastes better than granola. Grand Theft Auto is more fun than math homework. Having a Dodge Charger is cooler than having a Hyundai Elantra. Who cares about the costs? I can always fix my bad habits tomorrow.

[grayhatter]

> Why assume people will do what’s in their own long-term best interests, especially after being presented with a short-term thrill?

So, human behavior is more complicated than just counting? Why would someone eat pizza instead of granola? Are there some physiological reasons for this? I wonder if there might be an evolutionary advantage for a species to develop the desire for high caloric foods? That sounds like something that would make it much easier to make the decision to seek out pizza, and much less likely to choose granola. Especially when you consider that humans are mostly creatures of habit.

Saying just count calories is reductive to the point of absurdity. you can tell it doesn't work because it hasn't worked for society for decades, yet it's such an obvious solution no one stops to account for the astronomical amount of evidence that proves "just try harder" does not work on most humans. So, do you want to be right, or would you like to do something that actually helps humans improve their quality of life? "Just try harder" doesn't work, and it takes wilful ignorance of the evidence to claim otherwise.

let's apply this same logic to writing code, we wouldn't have any more bugs if people just reviewed their changes before committing, and wrote that one extra test, right? Works on my machine, ship it to prod... what do you mean millions of computers now bsod on boot? Surely it was just that one extra test, and it's pointless to do staged rollouts or smoke tests or anything like that?

Just never make a mistake is obviously asinine whether you apply it to writing code, or deciding what to eat. The difference being we don't have a millennia of evolution trying to convince us to write bugs.

I agree with the premise, people are responsible for their diet their decisions and their habits. I just don't agree knowledge of that is enough for everyone to improve their quality of life.