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I am not fat. Nearly everyone I know is not fat. None of us put much effort into being not fat, only the fat people struggle. OK, I go for a 20 minute walk most days. I do a few minutes of bodyweight exercise from time to time. I play Beat Saber sometimes (which is fun and energetic, still the best thing to do with a VR headset IMO). I don't think exercise has any effect on my weight, it's just for fitness. I used to do very little exercise and remained thin.
I live in Australia, which is not a terribly thin country. 31% compared to America's 42% obesity rate. There are loads of fat people around, most people live a pretty sedentary lifestyle with a heavy reliance on cars. I spend my day staring at a screen.
I'm convinced that I live the easy pre-1960s lifestyle where I can eat as much as I want to while staying thin. I just eat normal food that our ancestors would've recognized. Brown bread, rice, milk, fresh fruit, carrots, beans, potatoes, rice, beef, chicken, fish, yoghurt... Occasionally I have stuff like ice cream, fruit juice, potato chips, dates and chocolate. I'm not shopping at an organic farmer's market, just a normal supermarket. None of this requires much effort. It tastes fine and I still have sweet things occasionally. Yoghurt with berries in it is quite nice.
But I see what other people buy when they complain about inflation and I immediately think 'this is all processed, plastic crap, it's not really food and you shouldn't be buying it'. Consider shrinkflation: https://old.reddit.com/r/shrinkflation/ It's nearly all Toblerone, cookies, chocolatey cereal, brownies, doughnuts, pizza, pringles, soft drink, McDonalds... I bet that if your diet looks like that subreddit, you will struggle with your weight. They're not complaining about smaller loaves of bread, put it that way.
Food preparation is trivial, you just stick vegetables and meat on a pan and let it cook. Where I live full-cream milk is cheaper than Coca Cola, it's not like there's much price pressure. And food is an acquired taste, you can learn to eat anything. The artificially flavoured chips with all the spices and meat flavouring taste awful to me, I can't stand KFC. The Scots eat haggis, the Nords eat disgusting rotten fish, the Chinese eat anything that moves. The diet of our recent ancestors is not big culinary ask.
Both haggis and surströmming are perfectly fine, I even actively like the Swedish equivalent of haggis (Pölsa) and eat it regularly, and unlike haggis it includes the tendons. The issue with surströmming is the smell, not the taste, but unlike haggis this is more of a meme food anyway.
Our recent ancestors generally weren't that desperate or retarded. The food they made was and is pretty good.
People get freaked out by innards or whatever but it's perfectly fine food. People eat sausages just fine and thats made with intestines.
The 50s and 60s probably literally was a nadir of mass market food quality in the anglosphere for various reasons. Crack open a fifties cookbook sometime; it's often normal foods still eaten today but underseasoned and overcooked.
I agree that innards are perfectly fine(I'll happily leave nordic seafood to nordics) and moderners are squeamish. But there does seem to have legitimately been a generational loss of cooking skills in the anglosphere partially compensated for by eating garbage instead of fresh food. I'm reminded of France's consistently lower obesity rates- they still have a thing about eating fresh food.
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I learned that some of the more entrepreneurial of the relatively few South Asian immigrants in Scotland invented the "haggis pakoda".
That convinced me there's such a thing as too much assimilation and fusion of cuisines.
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