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Let's go further. I posited this one on reddit a while back. Let's suppose an eccentric billionaire credibly offered a literal billion dollars to a somewhat-randomly-selected obese person, on the condition that they lose a certain, reasonable amount of weight for their height/gender/etc. and keep it off for, say, five years (this is often a cited duration). Let's say they take drugs/surgery/whatever off the table and it's agreed (perhaps monitored) that it's going to be only "diet and exercise", "CICO", or whatever descriptor. They could plausibly take out loans against the future payout to the extent that lenders think they're likely to collect, which they could use to pay for professional advice (let's say it's highly likely that the person will accept the billionaire's recommendation for a professional who deeply understands caloric balance, macro/micronutrients, sports science, personal training, etc.) or even, say, quitting their job in the meantime or whatever if the numbers allow it. What do you think their chance of success would be?
I've got some other great hypotheticals along opposite lines, but let's just do a direct hyper variant of yours first.
If you can borrow enough money against your expected billion to quit your job and literally redesign your life around being thin, and are willing to do so, my best guess is that most people can manage to keep the weight off for 5 years. But I expect the required measures to be extreme; exercising for several hours every other day, chugging water all day to kill hunger, moving to a cold climate to burn more calories maintaining body temperature, eating bland food like Soylent and MealSquares, avoiding social occasions like birthdays and weddings so that you are not tempted to break your diet, etc. In the worst case, they might have to move to an isolated rural area in Alaska to avoid just driving down to the Walmart for a snack raid. It'd be something like a medical residency, where you endure four years of hell in exchange for a greatly improved rest of your life. And, of course, I expect the weight to come roaring back as soon as the 5 years are over and return to a normal life.
In 2025, a normal life makes you fat. It shouldn't take an extraordinary life to avoid being fat. And, for most of human history, it didn't. Sometime in the last few decades, something changed such that ordinary levels of exercise and satiety and willpower simply aren't enough anymore to avoid being fat. Since most people do not have the slack to redesign their entire lives around being thin, a realistic solution to the obesity epidemic needs to involve either identifying and removing the orange soda or inventing some kind of orange soda antidote. Telling people to just consume less calories than they spend is a useless distraction, like telling an adult who counts on his finger to just study harder for the AP Calc exam.
Awesome. So, we're not dealing with, like, a biological inability or anything. Not in the same class as we might be dealing with if there was just, like, a clear IQ cutoff, such that a big percentage of people were literally just cognitively incapable of learning calculus or something.
Instead, we're in the fuzzy land of what incentives "should be" enough or how much "effort" people might have to put in. It's fuzzy, yes, but we're far from the land of, "People can't do this." We're in the land of, "Well, you want to learn calculus; let's take a look at your grades in algebra and trig. Here's a reasonable estimate of about how much effort you're going to have to put in. It obviously won't be trivial; it'll take some work to learn calculus. But you can do it if you put in approximately this amount of effort. [And oh by the way, here are a bunch of strategies to help.]"
Your expectations would be wrong. Empirically. From personal experience and the experience of many many many other people. I think you just lack the personal experience to be aware of what it's like. Do you actually personally know anyone who has just done it? Just tracked their calories, lost some weight, then proceeded to eat at maintenance after? Have you spoken to them about their experience? Or are you just guessing in your expectation? Yes, as your cut gets deeper, you feel physical and mental effects. I've felt them. Intelligent strategies allow for a period of maintenance (a "diet break") to help alleviate these symptoms before continuing. They're annoying, but not that bad. When you return to maintenance, it's not all that bad in the long term.
Right now, we go the gym probably 3-4 days a week. Work has been weird for us lately, so not as often as we like, and not as much time as we'd like. Often just main lifts; basically no cardio. Almost negligible caloric impact, TBH. We eat good, tasty food. Literally just had Sichuan for dinner. We know about how many calories are in the recipe, and we portion it out accordingly in a way that we know approximately fits our maintenance calorie needs. Not a drop of Soylent or a crumb of a MealSquare in sight. Special occasions are nothing. Literally just had two of those this week. That is an outlier. But yeah, even if I blow my maintenance by 500cal on a special occasion, it's pretty trivial to make up for it long-term. We live in a city, four minutes away from multiple grocery stores (including a wonderful Asian market with excellently flavorful foods).
We live a normal life. This is normal life. We just know how many calories we need, because we tracked it for a while. We know about how many calories are in most of our foods, and we don't even track it anymore. Our portions aren't super exactly precise; they're in the right ballpark. It's normal life, and it's been about five years now since my wife got in on it, too. I honestly think you just don't know anyone who lives a normal life, but has the knowledge and experience.
I don't think the average person can pass the AP Calc exam even if you offer them a billion dollar reward and let them take 5 years of full-time prep.
When I was in college, I somehow got it into my head that it would be a good idea to do ROTC, so I spent all summer dieting and exercising to lose weight. I never quite reached the army height and weight standards for my age, but I got close, losing a ton of weight. However:
Anyway, I ended up dropping out of ROTC to focus on math, but that didn't work out, either.
I read this comment as confirming that you don't actually personally know anyone who has done it. I'm not surprised, because frankly, your previously-stated "expectation" is wildly miscalibrated. Shockingly so for a rationalist-adjacent forum. So incredibly miscalibrated that it's actually more extreme than the first-hand accounts I've heard from literal competitive pro bodybuilders, who are trying to get their body fat percentage deep into the single digits, to a place where it is literally, physically unsustainable over time. People who dedicated years of their life to an extreme competitive pursuit... and your expectation is that just a normal person achieving a normal weight necessitates even more extreme measures?! Rarely in the history of these forums have I ever seen particular views that are this far out from reality.
But again, I'm sort of not surprised. I haven't been banging the drum too loudly, but I've been banging it a little; this is basically the most plausible explanation for why people observe that "diet and exercise doesn't work" - because most people are frankly ignorant of the reality of the world. Worse, they're probably being actively deceived. There's bullshit on TV like The Biggest Loser. There is no show called The Normal Loser. TV is endlessly obsessed by the "extreme". You don't see just a normal person learning how the world works, learning how to take agency over their consumption, taking data and observing over time that, yes, indeed, 500cal/day ≈ 1lb/wk, and if you remain relatively consistent over long periods of time, you will lose weight. You don't see that it's noisy, that it fluctuates, that people aren't hyper-precise and sometimes have special occasions or whatever... but that in the end, if you just keep doing the damn thing, it works. You don't see that you can eat a normal amount of normal food, living a normal life, and have it just work. And so people try stupid (or obviously unsustainable) stuff instead, it doesn't work (because it was stupid or obviously unsustainable), that gets chalked up in the "statistics", and it reinforces the idea that nothing works.
The problem is a combination of it being hard to market "generics" and woke takeover of government public health and messaging. First, I joke about "generics" in terms of drugs, but yeah, it's bloody hard to monetize the bog standard advice that is scientific reality. People see the signs at the gym they drive by that promise "Lose 20lbs in 30 days!" or whatever. They're inundated by huge promises, and those folks need to either bait-and-switch you... or have you do something that is obviously unsustainable. Both cases are likely to contribute to the statistics and beliefs that science-based diet and exercise "don't work". A while ago, I covered here what I viewed as an arbitrage attempt, trying to package the basic scientifically-proven advice into a package that might attract customers in a market flooded by deception and which had a funny scheme to accomplish monetization. It's just bloody hard to make money telling people that, yes, we know how science works, that no, you're not magic or special, that yes, you can do this if you know what you're getting into and do it over a long time, that no, you don't have to go to extremes like a bodybuilder or like move to Alaska or anything, etc. Probably the only people who can monetize this are some number of personal trainers, who can have a no shit, come to Jesus personal conversation with their client, assess their willingness to believe and/or the degree to which they have been deceived, etc. That doesn't currently scale in a world full of lying liars.
Second, the woke takeover of government public health and messaging. It probably would take a gov't funded, like documentary series or something. There's an obvious profit-related reason why you see shit like The Biggest Loser and not The Normal Loser. How many years would you have to dedicate to filming that? How would you possibly fund it? If you want to retain credibility, only provide scientifically-validated information, and not have to take a bunch of money from this commercial weight-loss program or that commercial weight-loss program or this app or that app or whatever, where would you get the money for such a significant endeavor? I guess maybe some other nonprofit, but those have been taken over by the lefties, too. There's just no appetite with them to show normal people, living normal lives, taking agency and controlling their weight in accordance with scientific reality. In a former time, with old governments, who didn't reject scientific reality of something as simple as biology in favor of wokeness, and which acknowledged that this is a significant matter of importance on which public education is seriously needed and seriously lacking, perhaps you might have gotten such a thing.
Frankly, without something like that to point you to, it's going to be hard for you to realize just how insanely miscalibrated you are. You're probably not going to, like, go randomly meet some people in real life who know the scientific reality, have personally used it, continue to live normal lives using it, and are willing to talk to you about it. To be honest, we are often pretty careful in real life to not be too blunt about our knowledge of the scientific reality. We sometimes nibble around the edges with folks in conversation, but most people don't want to hear it in full. It's weird. We worry that they will think that we're judging them if we even talk about our knowledge of how reality works. So, we kinda don't talk about it much. So people don't have exposure to know that you can live a normal life, doing normal things, and be perfectly fine.
They just don't know. You just don't know. You're extremely miscalibrated. None of this is surprising, because very few people have an incentive to tell you the truth and many many people have an incentive to lie to you and intentionally cause you to be wildly miscalibrated.
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