Such an important subject and they touch on important topics within that subject, but ultimately end up confusing things more and ultimately probably making thi

Such an important subject and they touch on important topics within that subject, but ultimately end up confusing things more and ultimately probably making things even harder for those who would be in service of advice on how to manage their weight (most of us nowadays). Losing fat when overweight, provides very clear health benefits, we don't need to look at observational studies for this, the fact that gastric bypass operations have such positive impact on health is enough to show this. It's true, that dietary advice rarely can make any lasting dent in population level body composition, however, this should not be confused to mean that a motivated individual can't. A very simple and robust method is to count calories and drop the amount until the desired level of weight loss is achieved, then simply revert back to a comfortable level when the goal is reached. It's just that this takes a level of motivation that most people don't have. This is not surprising as many of the negative effects of being overweight are rather subtle and takes time to appear. This means that many people will have to live with their overweight and ideally not feel severe anxiety from it, which is the constructive point the article is making. The problem is when they try to cloud the evidence to achieve this goal. This makes people believe that staying at a healthy weight or losing fat when overweight is not meaningful at all and you can be just as healthy while being obese as long as you take some walks and eat your greens. Which in turn means that we don't get motivation to do the things we need to keep our weight in check. Now, this doesn't, of course mean that keeping a healthy weight is the ONLY thing that matters. But it's a pretty important one, in particular for those who are obese.