@Lilac- You are still saying “overeating” as if too much food consumption, and that alone, is the problem. I don’t believe that. We have plenty of evidence to the contrary. What about the super thin people that struggle to put on weight even when eating vast amounts of food? What about those lean and non-overweight competitive eaters, like Kobayashi, Matt Stonie, and Joey Chesnut?
And even looking at your own reasoning….. why would food continue to be “delicious” if it were truly “overconsumed?” I think everyone has, at some point in their life, gorged on some food to the point that they actually got sick of it, and lost the taste for a while, sometimes months or years. “Deliciousness” is not an inherent property of food, it’s your body’s reaction to food. So, why aren’t hunger and taste signals regulating food intake?
And also to that point, why not just dispose of excess “calories” in some way? Generate extra heat, have some desire to run around the block a few times or go out dancing, or just excrete it as waste? Why shuttle it to fat? And if it is stored….. why not shuttle it to muscle?
I don’t know what you are referring to as the “olden” days, but being overweight or obese was not a wide scale problem until the 70s or 80s, and it’s prevalence has only increased since then. Really, prior to the 50s, the big issue with weight was being too thin. Sedentary workers used to fall victim to this by losing their appetite. And the “matronly” women you refer to tended to be a lot older, so if they were dealing with weight issues, they were in their 50s, 60s or older, not in their teens, 20s, 30s, or 40s, like so many overweight and obese people are today.
I’ll agree, it’s not easily solved, but a lot of that stems from this refusal to look at some of the conditions and foods that have created this obesity problem (again, excess PUFA and iron fortification, for example), as well as known endocrine changes that affect those who are overweight. For example, cortisol is usually very high, testosterone is usually lower in overweight men, serotonin and endotoxin are higher, fat stores are more unsaturated, enzymes like SCD1 and Fatty Acid Synthase are overactivated, thyroid hormone is at lower levels and so on. Serum levels of glucose, FFAs and BCAAs all tend to be elevated. And with all that, the “official” advice continues to basically be “eat less, move more.” That will always fail in the long run, if the underlying conditions that created the problem in the first place are never addressed.
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