alt Hacker NewsDo you think overweight people don't know why they're overweight?
There are plenty of obese people that understand nutrition just fine, there are obese people who understand it well enough to have lost significant weight and gained it all back.
Clearly there is something else going on that we haven't grasped yet.
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Education may involve "finding a strategy that works for you". There are so, so many different ways to combat disordered eating. These are learnable things. My thought around "better education" is that the cycle of disordered eating can be stopped at some point before parents pass it on to their kids, at least (as I just posted in adjacent comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41811916 ). I absolutely recognize how insanely difficult it is to come back from disordered eating and stay at a lower weight after finally reaching it.
Though, now that you ask, I do think that many people don't actually know why they are overweight. They say it's because "McDonald's is cheaper than buying good food", not realizing the McDonalds won't satiate them and they will eat/spend more because their body is starved for proper nutrition. Watch the series "Supersize vs. Superskinny" and observe how nearly every participant is utterly clueless as to the underlying causes of their challenges on either size of the disordered-eating scale.
Psychology of hunger behaviors.
Understanding nutrition, and eating habits in practice, are two very different things.
Regaining weight is the primary issue really. Most people are capable of losing weight, but gain it back, and it gets harder going forward. Metabolic adaptation is better understood now and among the factors (.e.g increasing caloric intake too quickly after weight loss), but falling into old habits that are culturally ubiquitous is a glaring part of the problem.
Former drug addicts are told now to sever contact with peers who partook in those indulgences as they're likely to pull them back in. With food, it can be more than a minor subculture. There are regions of the US that have much higher obesity rates than others. Not having family members and a romantic partner on board can be difficult.