Maybe Dieting Fails Because Humans Need Fewer Calories Than We Think

The idea of “low-hanging fruit” describes something which may be obvious in hindsight which anyone could have discovered, or at least was easier than assumed, but for whatever reason no one noticed until it was pointed out. This elicits the reaction, “Oh…why didn’t I think of that?” Or in mathematics, the recent wave of AI-generated proofs has shown that some conjectures were not as intractable as previously thought. The actual difficulty was that mathematicians did not know where to look. AI has been able to resolve such impasses, as illustrated by the recent disproof of the Jacobian conjecture. This leads to dieting and obesity. Why does dieting have such a high failure rate, and what can be done about it? To the answer the second question, GLP-1 drugs are highly effective, and better drugs are on the horizon. It’s possible obesity may be curable. But for the first question, the high failure rate of dieting is commonly blamed on “hyperpalatable foods,” “loss of willpower,” or,…