<i>&quot;But not the whole thing. I could make conscious choices to make my body healthier. But I don&#x27;t, and therefore I can accept at least a little bit of the blame.&quot;</i><p>I think this is the sad truth of the matter (at least for now). People tend to fall into one of two camps: 1) Those who believe that obesity is largely (if not entirely) the obese person&#x27;s fault; 2) Those who believe that obesity is heavily influenced by factors outside of conscious control, and therefore, there&#x27;s nothing to be done about it.<p>The truth is somewhere in the middle. Some people are luckier than others, genetically or epigenetically. The unlucky ones <i>will</i> put on fat more easily, and they <i>will</i> have a much harder time losing it. So that means they need to work twice as hard (if not 100x as hard) to keep it off. It&#x27;s a shitty break, but it&#x27;s the truth.<p>I grew up fat. Losing that fat took nothing short of a Herculean (and borderline unsustainable) dietary effort. I mean, I lived like an ascetic monk, depriving myself of any and all pleasurable food, for the better part of a decade. I worked out like a crazy person. And even today, keeping off the fat requires a constant vigil over everything I eat, and the amount of exercise I do. I wasn&#x27;t responsible for getting fat in the first place -- I lost a prenatal dice roll -- but I <i>did</i> take responsibility for battling the bulge.<p><i>&quot;Continually reiterating the thermodynamic dietary hypothesis to me (energy eaten minus energy expended) does not help. I doubt it helps anyone except possibly those who do not already know what a kilocalorie is.&quot;</i><p>Agreed. It&#x27;s also willfully reductionist, and it smacks of passive-aggressive moralizing. To me, rattling off the calories-in-calories-out line is no more helpful than calling obese people lazy, stupid, irresponsible, or sinful. (And in basically 90% of the contexts in which someone says it, that&#x27;s the subtextual insinuation.) It&#x27;s unproductive. It&#x27;s an attempt to close the case summarily, and this case needs to stay open.