alt Hacker NewsUnderstanding 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.
That’s kinda part of my point. Cutting yourself off from drug enablers is one thing. Cutting yourself off from your friends and family is another. Especially since eating is something you can’t not do, and is deeply tied to cultural and social customs of everyone. It is impossible to live and never be offered an unhealthy food choice no matter how much support and good decisions there are. Conversely, it is very easy to live my life without being offered heroin.
Plenty of overweight people really, really, really want to lose weight and do all of the right things, but report that it is difficult to impossible to maintain the weight loss. Many of them gain the weight back, and this is crucial, but don’t continue gaining past a certain point. Combine that with the very regional nature of obesity and I think that there is a VERY strong case to be made that there is an environmental or external cause of obesity that we haven’t identified yet (junk food is too simple of an explanation, and doesn’t adequately explain everything).
The point I’m getting at is that a lot of these drugs also yield some sort of drastic behavioral change like a reduced indulgence in other impulsive harmful behaviors. I really think that there is something that is throwing us out of whack behaviorally, and obesity is a symptom of that.
The fact that a hormonal correction is able to fix both obesity and other addictions is a very interesting result.