Dieting and working out definitely does work, the problem is that the median person attempting it will badly yo-yo over the years while feeling terrible about themselves and probably not really getting that much healthier over the long term. So it does work, but it also doesn't, practically at all, for the overwhelming majority of people who attempt it. That's why a lot of these posts end up having people talking (well, writing) past each other: diet and exercise does work. It works great. It's also a miserable failure that's nearly useless.
Again, even those with extensive and expensive outside support see depressingly poor outcomes on average, though of course that does improve things somewhat. Those are still a ton worse than GLP-1 agonists, as far as efficacy. And that's the very best effort we've got for "diet and exercise" interventions, short of live-in dietitians and chefs and personal trainers or putting people in total institutions.
Meanwhile, people move from a skinnier country to a fatter one and usually get fatter. Willpower wasn't what was keeping them skinnier. It makes no sense to expect willpower to be what'll make the fatter country skinnier when that doesn't seem to be why skinnier countries are skinnier.
Curation and promotion, even if done by a machine (LOL, why does that matter at all?) needs to come with significant liability.
It should be possible to protect content hosting services from extensive liability while not protecting companies from the consequences of what they choose to promote and present to people. Those are two separate and very different activities that aren't even necessarily connected (you could curate and promote without hosting, and in fact this happens all the time; you can host without curating and promoting, this also happens all the time—in fact, these typically are not mixed together outside of social media companies with their damned "algorithms", as far as content from 3rd parties goes)
I averaged 4,000+ calories per day in high school through the first couple years of college. Almost all junk food—pizza, chips, crackers, eggo waffles, french fries, that kind of thing. Enormous amounts of soda. Milk shakes. Cappuchinos and mochas, in the later years.
All I did for activity was ride bikes some and lift weights a little, plus usual kid stuff, no serious sports or training.
I had visible ab muscles and would get a full-on six pack if I did e.g. a lot of swimming in a week. During those times I'd have relatives concerned I was sick or something, my face would get so gaunt.
Metabolisms are weird. HGH and T are basically magic I guess? I truly have no idea where all that energy was going. Must have been mostly coming out the other end unprocessed, I suppose, or else somehow used up by my gut biome. Can't figure any other way.
On an individual level, yes, "try harder" is all we personally can do (well, until GLP-1 agonists, LOL). So, sure, it's "good advice" in that it's all there is.
On a policy level? As far as medical intervention efficacy? It's entirely useless. Even crazy-expensive interventions involving several hours of professionals' time per week, for months on end, are wildly less effective than one might think.
What does work? Changing environment! Just ("just", lol) move to a skinnier country. You'll probably lose weight. Conversely, if people from there move to the US, they'll probably get fatter. That is, willpower and accountability and all that are not why certain populations are skinnier than others. Environment, which likely encompasses tons of factors that'd be incredibly expensive and take decades to change, seems to be it.
> Your claim that "trying harder" is "akin to insanity" is such an overreaction that it's misleading exaggeration, not worthy of further dissection.
"Akin to insanity" in the sense that nobody who's aware of research on the topic thinks it can work over a population... I mean, yes, very much so.
Given the current balance of the court, I'd say it's about even odds we end the entire century without ever having had a liberal court the entire time. Best reasonable case we're a solid couple of decades from it, and even that's not got great odds.
We'd have a better chance if anyone with power were talking about court reform to make the Supreme Court justices e.g. drawn by lot for each session from the district courts, but approximately nobody is. It'd be damn good and long overdue reform, but oh well.
And the thing is, we've already had a fairly conservative court for decades. I'm pretty likely to die, even if of old age, never having seen an actually-liberal court in the US my entire life. Like, WTF. Frankly, no wonder so much of our situation is fucked up, backwards, and authoritarianism-friendly. And (sigh) any serious attempts to fix that are basically on hold for many decades more, assuming rule of law survives that long anyway.
[EDIT] My point, in short, is that "we still have [thing], we just have to wait for a liberal court that'll support it" is functionally indistinguishable from not having [thing].
It has nothing to do with spirituality or morals. Skinny-country person moves to the US, they get fatter (statistically speaking). They weren't skinny at home because they were better spiritual warriors or whatever, but because they didn't live in the US.
The options are to fix what are probably a whole bunch of problems across multiple domains at a cost of $(enormous sum) with a project spanning many decades (and which may easily be derailed and set back years and years at any time), so that living in the US doesn't make people gain weight, or... drugs, that work today. From a policy perspective, those are the only options. There's no good reason to think that reversing "moral decline" or whatever will help, since that doesn't seem to be why some other countries are skinnier.
1) Find a few brands with more options than just "S/M/L". You want fit variants, like Brooks Brothers' "Milano/Regent/Madison" (and some others) or Jcrew's "slim/extra slim". If button-ups, consider going with neck & arm sizing plus the above cut-variants, instead of "S/M/L" sizing at all. Also, look into Japanese brands (Kamakura?), they might fit you better even if they only have one or two variants of cut. These brands will tend to have pretty consistent sizing.
2) You're gonna want measurements of your own actual chest, neck, and natural waist. Easy to DIY close enough for this, no need for help.
3) Also, measurements of some clothes that fit you well. Shoulder, seam-to-seam; arm length; pit-to-pit width.
4) The brands from #1 will have charts that provide measurements for their clothes, or else suggested body measurements at a given size. Use the info from 2 & 3 to get good guesses at which sizes and fit variants will work.
5) Thrift or ebay some options. You can resell the ones that don't work out for close to what you bought them for, if it's worth it to you, or just dump them at goodwill. You're paying a few tens or a little over a hundred dollars in failures to find your sizing in a few brands. This is basically the only totally-lost cost to this process (and again, you can actually recover most of this if it's worth it to you)
6) Now you know your size in a few good consistent-sized brands. Ebay with your exact size in each brand (use saved searches, like "(jcrew,j.crew,j crew) 'extra slim' medium shirt") or sale-shop directly from the brands' sites. No, or very few, returns needed. You can also thrift-shop much more efficiently, at least at places that size-sort. You're just skimming for brand tags you recognize, and totally ignoring everything else.
[EDIT] And actually with the measurements from #3 you can ebay lots of shirts from brands you've never tried, with reasonable success rates—any listing worth bothering with will provide pit-to-pit and (when relevant) sleeve measurements, at least.