Earlier quoted context omitted.
> overreport their physical activity, like "I can jog 10 miles", or "I play tennis about 7 hours a week", or "I regularly make 60 mile bike rides". If you do, you're the extreme outlier, and it doesn't change the data. Assuming you can do those things, you're almost certainly still in your 20s, and the health effects of your weight haven't really caught up with your body yet I'm 37, and 6'5". and if you're calling me…
I said that you may be an extreme outlier. You're also larger than every NFL player in history, everyone in World's Strongest Man, etc. A 10 mile jog (let's say 80-100 minutes of uninterrupted running) is the sort of "I could eat 50 eggs" number people pull out. At 6'5", you are an outlier. 2kcal is too low, much as it's too high for the average woman. This doesn't mean that metabolism is a "colloquial" term. It mean…
I think perhaps you're misunderstanding what "anecdote" means? Anecdotes can certainly be factual - the point is not that it's false, it's that it's not sufficiently representative. In particular, I wasn't challenging his assertion that cutting calories allowed him to lose weight, only the implicit claim that doing so is a universally straightforward and successful approach to effecting actual weight loss.
> and all the rest should be explored alongside drugs
Well yes! That's my position! I don't think "drugs will solve this problem", I think the problem is solvable, and that we need to understand it and its context better in order to do so. I'm a tinkerer, I've been experimenting with my own habits, diet, and activities constantly trying to better understand how I can be healthier and still happy, and there have been some real gains from that process.
I feel like (a) you don't agree with the approach Fella is taking (which is fine, you've clearly looked into it more than I have), and (b) you've decided that my opinions about the effectiveness of diets are somehow "on their side". I think I've been really clear about this, but I have no stake in their game, aside from being excited to see that people are trying to do something other than convince fat people that this diet will totally work (and if it doesn't it's because they were yet again bad people that deserve to be fat.)
> "the physical, psychological, and emotional components" is a long way of saying "it's hard", and "the experiential variance I'm describing" is "the payoff did not seem to be worth the cost".
Not even close. But you seem intelligent, so I'm left wondering if you're intentionally misinterpreting me to score some kind of internet points?
The intent of those phrases is to emphasize that the costs to the humans involved vary. They are different. So yeah, "the payoff did not seem to be worth the cost", in the same sense that a man with a bad knee would evaluate the cost/value of paying for a taxi differently.