Body shaming, and "My Big Fat Fabulous Life"

[CapnAwesome]

No shit, Sherlock - here's your sign.

Psychologically and physiologically it's a damn sight harder than that.

You can say that again.

From an evolutionary standpoint, our brains and bodies still consider food as scarce/difficult to come by. The human brain is programmed to interpret even a modest weight loss as starvation, and subsequently responds to it as a threat to survival . The brain makes no distinction between true starvation and a reduced calorie eating plan; It will "defend" the body with ruthless efficiency by attempting to hold on to existing fat stores (significantly slowing metabolism) and attempt to recover/regain any fat that's been lost (witholding/decreasing the release of hormones that signify fullness) all the same. 

That alone is enough to make voluntary, permanent weight-loss extraordinarily difficult to achieve and a highly unlikely state to maintain. Human beings are literally fighting an onslaught of real neurological/chemical responses honed by millions of years of evolution, that are expressly designed for the task to fail ; not just general laziness or a lack of "willpower". 

Keep in mind, that's without other contributing factors such as genetic predisposition, excessive cortisol production/additional hormonal issues, disorder/disease, addictive behavior, etc. even being brought into the picture.

This is why the notion of weight loss as a simple matter of calories in/calories out is nonsense. It's clearly an assertion that's primarily derived from ignorance (and personal distaste, I suspect) as it blatantly fails to account for the human body being a complex biological machine. The protests of those who insist that they're "logically" arguing the matter are quite laughable, considering the fact that ACTUAL scientists say otherwise.

All of those things you mention just effect the number of calories that you either put in or take out, minus perhaps a disease, which is very rare. Saying that it's a matter of calories in/calories out doesn't exclude any of the stuff that you just said. All of that just changes the amount of calories in the equation. Metabolism doesn't vary that much from person to person. https://examine.com/nutrition/does-metab...wo-people/ An extreme metabolism variance between two people is 8%. That's around 160 calories or 2 slices of bread. So people who say they are fat because of their metabolism are scientifically ignorant about it or just lying to make excuses. All of those neurological/chemical responses just mean more calories in. So no matter how complex the machine is, if you burn more calories then you take in, you lose weight. That someone says that as a fact, which it is, doesn't mean that the other stuff doesn't change calories in or calories out one way or another.

If you are really concerned about scientific acceptance, I'd take a look at the fat acceptance movement. Which denies tons of basic science and would rewrite our biology books just as quick are creationists would.

The problem is one of lifestyle. People don't keep off weight because they go on diets or go the the gym to lose weight but make no lifestyle changes. If someone became a road biker as a lifestyle, rather the biking to lose weight and then returning to normal habits, I can guarantee they would keep the weight off. People in Europe, which has far less obesity then America, have all the genetic programming to gain weight that Americans do. Yet their lifestyles make them on average thinner then Americans. It's about lifestyle, not metabolism and very rarely a disease or disorder.