I’m not sure what’s with lately all the counsels of despair on the possibility of losing weight.

This latest example at The New York Times combines some dubious science with poorly-derived “conclusions.”

Important questions are omitted such as if everyone is inevitably destined to be the size of a tractor-trailer, why 50 years ago were people of that size relatively rare?

Even I am old enough to remember when seeing someone over 350 pounds was really, really unusual — so much so that it caused a social ripple through people nearby. Now it’s so quotidian no one even notices.

The questionable science — unsourced of course — is that one can be healthy and obese at the same time for very long. This does not appear to be the case.

And there’s this bit which is almost guaranteed to be false.

After several months of eating fewer than 800 calories a day and spending an hour at the gym every morning, I hadn’t lost another ounce.

Self-reported calorie counts are highly suspect. Almost everyone lies to themselves on this. Unless she is an extreme, one in 10 million genetic freak, with working out an hour a day and eating less than 800 calories she would’ve been losing well more than a pound a week.

Reality is that she was probably not counting snacks, drinks, “just this onces,” etc. Of course.

It’s probably not the only problem (perhaps this is the main one), but one problem is that Americans want to be told that they don’t have to change a thing, don’t have to move a muscle, to have that perfect body, that ideal shape — or, worse, that they are just a perfect little snowflake just as they are, in all their corpulent glory.

Alas, neither image comports with reality nor ever will.

Now here’s the truth: most things worth doing in life are fucking hard. But ain’t nobody want to hear that. It is athwart the entire cultural current of “one weird trick” and “easy weight loss, guaranteed.”

So the refrain of impossibility is all that will reverberate in most ears, and much failure will ensue.