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SarahC comments on How I Lost 100 Pounds Using TDT - Less Wrong
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It's VERY hard to accept that your own anecdotal experience doesn't apply to everyone. Especially in nutrition/diet/exercise, where basically the only information we have available is anecdotal. (Well, there are medical studies, but they tend to test only not-very-strenuous diets and exercise routines.) It takes a while before you notice that there are real physiological variations. There are people who can't run without joint pain; there are people who can't go three hours without eating or they'll faint; etc. There really are constraints that we don't set ourselves. It's not always an easy thing to accept.
If only that were the situation.
There's the generalizing from the one example which is your own experience, and then there's the generalizing from the one example that everyone is telling you is the real truth.
There's a complex, highly socially supported mind-blocking ideology which goes way beyond generalizing from one example. One is the common belief that "it's just a matter of "calories in, calories out", which eliminates a huge amount of biological detail. Another is "I didn't say it was easy", which is a way of blurring out the huge range of the amount of difficulty involved.
There seems to be an underlying belief that everyone is in some sense really fairly lean, so that any apparent health problems caused by (or causing!) weight loss can be ignored in favor of the Platonic truth of the ideal body.
It's not just politics is the mind-killer-- so are status markers.