As obesity keeps rising, more Americans are just giving up

Personally, I maxed out at a BMI of 34. I lost about 70 pounds, got back into the normal BMI range, and have stayed there for about a decade now. I changed my diet, changed my physical activities, and changed a lot of habits and modes of thinking. That last one is perhaps most important of all. For example, as kids, we were taught not to waste food, and that meant eating everything there was. Well, cleaning your plate (and the pot) isn't going to put food on the plates of starving children. Whether you eat it or not, the waste happened at the supermarket when you bought too much food!

My brother saw me losing weight and wanted to do it too, so I tried to help him. He hated the food I was now eating. He didn't want to work out. He didn't want to change the way he thought. Instead, he got a lot fatter and, eventually, a sleeve gastrectomy. He's not in the normal BMI range yet, but he's been making steady progress and it's not optional for him. He literally can't eat enough to stay fat. His stomach is now tiny and fills up rather quickly. The prep for the surgery was harsh, and included a brutal, several week long crash diet. The surgery itself went off without a hitch, but he still had to recover on a morphine drip. I have no idea what kind of pain that involves, but it can't be pleasant. Bottom line, he thought he was choosing the easy way at the time, but we now both know it was the hard way. Harder by far. I got healthy. He inflicted a disability on himself that has the side-effect of losing weight. He still isn't active and, not surprisingly, has terrible energy levels.

After both our experiences, I can reasonably say the media does a terrible job of helping people. It tells them about healthy things to eat, but never mentions these things are only healthy if you eat them instead of your usual fare, and in appropriate amounts. It tells people they need to be ripped, cross-fitting gym-bunnies to be fit, when doing just about anything besides sitting on your butt will be an improvement for many people. Finding a physical activity you can enjoy is far more important than being ripped. Above all, it rarely attempts to help people change the way they think, which is the key to making permanent changes.

TL;DR: If I had to offer one piece of advice to those wishing to lose weight and become more active, it would be to ignore all the crap articles out there on diet fads and gym-crazes and pay some attention to how you think about food and activity. Change how you think, and everything else will come as a consequence of that change.

It is somewhat harder to stay on the diet while traveling, attending conferences, or business meetings. Having a host choose a place to eat, offer you local cuisine, etc makes it harder to stay in keto. Hunger though, was never a problem after the first full week.

You're right that "eat less, fatty" is not a helpful message. That's actually the key point in these discussions - we do know how to avoid weight gain in the abstract sense (consume less than you burn), but the implementation of that is what's difficult. Different foods have different effects on metabolism; it's difficult to count calories accurately; people often overestimate the calories that exercise burns and underestimate their consumption. It's made more difficult by sedentary lifestyles, prepared foods, and so on.

If you are gaining a pound a month consuming nothing but soylent, then you're consuming too much of it. There's no way around that fact. But the point is that it's not a failing on your part - it just demonstrates how difficult it is in practice to control one's own lifestyle.