> other people are eating less and losing weight.
No, they're not, and that's my point.
Look at smoking that you mention. Smoking was unbelievably common a few decades ago. It's now pretty uncommon (in North America). Why? Were people just failing in the past, and now aren't failing? No, we made public health decisions that have dramatically dropped the proportion of the population that smokes cigarettes.
IOW: Treating it as an individual failing may feel good, and may even be "true", but it's not a useful framing of the problem. Treating it like a public health issue is massively more likely to work than just wagging your finger at people and telling them to just eat less.
Yes, when dealing with populations, enacting laws and propaganda that affects whole populations is the most effective way to change them. As a population, to fix fatness we need to do big things. But as a person, to fix fatness you need to do it yourself. If a doctor says you need to lose weight and you don't, you failed yourself. The system could have helped you, and maybe should have, but ultimately you failed.
To my initial point, Americans are overall uninterested in becoming thin. Public policy may be able to change that. I don't believe that people generally wanted to quit smoking in the 50s but couldn't, but instead that they generally didn't care about quitting. The same is true now for being fat. Only once the public consciousness shifted toward smoking being bad did smoking rates fall. That was a consequence of desires shifting due to (benevolent) propaganda. I'd love if we had similar ads on TV and such for fatness like we did for smoker's lungs.
> other people are eating less and losing weight. No, they're not, and that's my point.
Look at smoking that you mention. Smoking was unbelievably common a few decades ago. It's now pretty uncommon (in North America). Why? Were people just failing in the past, and now aren't failing? No, we made public health decisions that have dramatically dropped the proportion of the population that smokes cigarettes.
IOW: Treating it as an individual failing may feel good, and may even be "true", but it's not a useful framing of the problem. Treating it like a public health issue is massively more likely to work than just wagging your finger at people and telling them to just eat less.