> you really just have to eat healthier foods I'll give the article credit for mentioning processed foods, but otherwise, many people and even experts disagree

> you really just have to eat healthier foods I'll give the article credit for mentioning processed foods, but otherwise, many people and even experts disagree on what makes a food healthy. Telling people to just not "eat crap" and to cut out processed and fried foods is barely specific enough to be useful. The utility of eating a specific diet is that it actually identifies what foods should be avoided and why. If uneducated individuals just "eat healthy", they are likely to do things that either won't work or will backfire in the long run. > A lot of people think a diet is this magical thing that makes it easy for you Yes, because that's what an appropriate diet tends to do. When you eat a diet that doesn't overly engage the Randle cycle or raise insulin, losing body fat usually follows whether one counts their calories or not. If someone is overweight and they eat a low insulinogenic diet, and their food is satiating, both their eating frequency and their biology is likely to shift to not hold on to so much body fat anymore. The only thing that's not easy about such a diet is not being tempted by all the common foods that interfere with the metabolism. > you really just have to eat healthier foods That means very little. What does that mean? Eating Raisin Bran? Eating lots of leaves? Cutting out red meat? Eating lots of fruit? > move around in general Moving around can certainly help, but for weight loss and maintenance, it's far more efficient to eat an appropriate fuel substrate and to not eat excessively. You could burn 235 calories climbing the Empire State building for 30 minutes, or you could simply not eat those 235 calories and do something more interesting or productive with that time. This isn't to say that there aren't possible cardiovascular benefits from exercise, but it's not as efficient for fat burning as people think. For most of that 30 minutes the human body will be burning primarily glucose, so unless one is fasted they won't be shredding fat from the second they start climbing those stairs. > the truth is that it ultimately comes down to choosing foods that are good for you Again, any individual is unlikely to actually know what that means or come to a consensus with the next person on what that means. "eat healthy" means nothing. > rather than taking diet pills Yeah, they probably shouldn't do that. > or doing some extreme diet like keto or carnivore Neither of those are particularly "extreme" except that they eliminate many of the things that cause the human body to keep holding on to fat. As it turns out, they're both low-insulin diets, and the latter diet is the one that is most species-appropriate out of just about any other diet. No one has to eat keto or carnivore, but to suggest people shouldn't eat either form of diet is based on... what, exactly? > And that can be _hard_, because eating good food and being lazy are very easy to do and can be quite enjoyable. I agree. Eating good food is easy and enjoyable once one breaks past the standard advice of "eat healthy."