Why do people put on differing amounts of weight?

Or your mental state. Or working hours. Or illness and injury. Or depression. Or lifetime habits, possibly due to choices your parents made.

Yes, it is all our own faults. That doesn't mean it is easy to change. Nor does it make somebody a lesser person for having made poor choices.

BTW, It is also your own fault for everything else that is wrong in your life. Ever answered a question wrong, made a mistake, messed up a project, gotten a speeding ticket, injured yourself, or hurt anybody in any way? All your fault.

Perhaps throwing blame at problems just isn't a good approach to making things better?

https://youtu.be/DJklHwoYgBQ

Citation needed.

The ability of human beings to control their biology through willpower is limited (if you don't believe me, try holding your breath for 30 minutes, or not drinking anything for a few days). Willpower itself is limited, and motivation is itself influenced by mental health. And diseases like Prader-Willi and Emery-Dreifuss demonstrate situations in which motivation and willpower are irrelevant.

And that's only what we know.

Sometimes when I have dinner with friends, I'll observe a situation where two of them will order the same thing, the bigger one will wolf down the dinner and the thinner one will pick at it and eat maybe half. I don't see two people equally tempted, where one gives it to his cravings and other is morally strong. I see two people with two different drives.

Why do different people respond so differently the same meal? What is it our society that leads so many people to consume a calorie surplus? It's disappointing the number of people that don't even want to investigate the biological and psychological origins of such phenomenon, instead claiming (without evidence) that it's all about moral failure.

In the 19th century, when painkillers first started becoming available, physicians would refuse to give them to woman in childbirth, because the Bible says childbirth is supposed to be painful. Women had sinned, therefore they must suffer. That's nonsense, of course, but people really wanted to hold onto their moral judgements, even at the expense of biology, good medicine, and relief of suffering. I think we should be suspicious of any impulse to use moral judgement to avoid investigation into the causes of medical conditions. Like obesity.

Your statement is the equivalent of saying its a heroin junkies own fault: Technically true but useless. It also has many parallels in the way you grew up, differing genetics, etc.

If it were just a matter of willpower or simply eating less then I would already be my ideal weight. It isn't that simple. You can't detox off food and quit eating. At least a drug addict doesn't have to take just the /right/ amount of the drug every day to stay healthy!

The drive to eat is one of the most basic instincts. Evolution has created signals and feedback mechanisms far more powerful than our puny frontal lobes. The problem of too much food has simply never existed before. Fruit eventually falls to the ground and rots. During winter food becomes scarce. Excess food is consumed by other animals. For our entire evolutionary history the correct long-term survival move was to eat while the eatin' was good because there was definitely going to be some kind of lean time ahead.

The only simple or easy part of losing weight was cutting out sugared soda. That dropped 30 lbs. The rest was a slog and using various techniques to trick my body (like eating a large meal before going to the grocery store so I wouldn't buy anything outside my meal plan). It also involved lots of extremely strong urges to eat more and hunger pains. I have to think about what I eat every day and no matter what I do I will never be my ideal weight. Internal or external, this is a battle a lot of people just never face. They just eat when they are hungry and stop when they feel full. Of course their myopic view says it's just "calories in, calories out" (which the research has already proven is false... Some people gain more weight on the same calories).

There was a very highly cited paper in the NEJM where they studied a group of people who believed they were "diet resistant" using a new technique--doubly labeled water--to determine how much they were really eating and exercising.

Every single person in the study--every last one of them--lied to the doctors about how many calories he or she was eating.

http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJM199212313272701

The last paragraph says:

"In conclusion, all the obese subjects we studied who had a history of self-reported diet resistance had appropriate energy expenditure, but they misreported their actual food intake and physical activity."

In other words: "Fatties gonna fat."