There's an equal and opposite level of messaging to keep eating, which is less conscious and runs under the radar.

Snacks are literally designed to be addictive. TV ads start from birth. Most restaurants have huge portion sizes. "Family" and "Festival" events assume overeating is expected. Junk food is cheap and quality food is expensive. Overeating is framed as being "naughty" but also indulgent and nurturing.

All of this is a huge social problem that's not acknowledged at all.

It's very, very hard to Just Eat Less when there's a constant barrage of messaging encouraging you to do the opposite, and you're not even aware of it.

The contradictory messaging is actually a classic crazy-making psychological double bind. So of course it's very difficult to make a dent in this, and even harder to permanently change habits so all the contradictions no longer influence you.

ppl keep blaming this, but this is contradicted by shrinkflation, yet people still are getting fatter than ever. There is nothing to stop someone from buying more food to offset smaller portions.

After eliminating caffeine its like a switch entirely flipped in my brain turning off all the usual cravings I'd have for carbs/sugars/etc.

The quitting caffeine part was pretty horrible though. Not just because of the headaches (which weren't actually super bad for me) but I went through a couple of weeks of what I assume was for-reals depression/anhedonia as my brain figured out how to operate with non-blocked adenosine suddenly suppressing my dopamine levels.

I feel like there is more to it.

Obviously, I sympathize with you, and I noticed that when I switch from a bulking cycle to a cutting cycle, it is a bit difficult to adjust for the first couple of weeks as well.

But by god, I truly am struggling to switch the other way around, and it takes me months to adjust to the bulking cycle, even with the help of stuff like weed. And when I don’t work out aggresively and don’t keep track of my cycle, it feels just natural for me to default to eating way less, as opposed to the other way around.

To be clear, this isn’t meant to be a dig at your take. All I mean is that, I feel like the whole issue is a bit more complex.

You could just have good genetics in which your body is resistant to weight gain or you have a low appetite to begin with. As shown by the worldwide obesity epidemic, this is apparently quite an uncommon problem. 75% of country overweight or obese.

This moral judgement whereby losing weight is "good" in absolute, is such bullshit. For most of history, humans have fought starvation literally every day, and often had to make do with minimal caloric intake for weeks or months - in that context, genetics that kept you thin were definitely very bad.

Maybe the messaging should be "eat healthier"? How many obese people cook for themselves and eat exclusively from the outer aisles of the grocery (fruits, vegetables, seafood, meat, eggs, dairy)?

I could be wrong but I have to imagine the average obese person has a terrible diet. Portion control won't work at that point, you're already doomed to fail.

To be fair, most people have a terrible diet, it's just that some lucky individuals have the metabolism to overcome it. It seems like those people are increasingly the exception and a bad benchmark for how humans should eat.

I don't suggest this applies to you, but even a small amount of searching around and reading stuff on the web will reveal a substantial subgroup of outright thermodynamics deniers.

I’m familiar with people who believe that there are details of how a body metabolizes fuel , expends energy, and generally operates that escape analysis focused on fuel volume and physical activity. I am familiar with people who characterize this as denial of the laws of thermodynamics, but I am not familiar with anyone who seems to believe that there are situations in which the laws of thermodynamics are outright suspended.

I've heard people say this before, but when reading those arguments it mostly turns out to be people who think there's something more complicated going on with digestion, excretion, or metabolism such that eaten calories are more efficiently used for some, and burned off or passed through without full processing to some degree for people who self-reportedly "can't gain weight".

There have been studies on ababolics, synthetic testosterone, that demonstrate this. Taking steroids and doing absolutely nothing leads to more fat loss and more muscle gain than not taking steroids and working out. Which... yeah duh.

But people will still deny this, because of the implications. We all have different baselines, and nobody likes to hear that they got lucky in some ways. Everyone wants to believe the world and human condition is perfectly fair, so they feel that they deserve what they have.