From a reader in response to my post about James Q. Wilson’s essay on addiction:

Mr. Goldberg,
Thanks for pointing to bit about addiction in the latest CRB. It’s a topic near and dear to my heart. A few years back I was living a pretty silly life, and wound up flat broke and really fat. (Drinking at bars, while awesome in many ways, can do that to you.) So I stopped living that way, living on 800 calories a day for about a year. It was terrible, but I lost 160 pounds and dug myself out of debt entirely.
Here’s the thing, though; nobody can believe it happened that way. I wrote a book about it, called “The Urban Hermit.” (St. Martin’s; Picador). Reviews were generally positive, but almost all the complaints focused on the fact that I didn’t “dig deep enough” into the reasons for my fatness and brokeness. You must have been an alcoholic! You were raised wrong! AD/HD! Why won’t you plumb the depths of your soul for the cause of your bad choices?
Well, the cause was simple: Beer is delicious. So is meatloaf. Going to the bar is fun, going to bed and working hard all day are not. All these things are demonstrably and obviously true. So I acted upon them.
These observations make people mad because they think I am implying that… people have agency and choices and all the rest.
Heaven forfend.
What I tell people is: If it’s really “impossible” for some people to lose weight, how come all the contestants on Survivor are slimmer at the end than at the beginning? If all these people really CAN’T lose weight, shouldn’t some people representing this cohort have appeared on the show by now? Like Hurley on Lost? Well, it hasn’t happened. And as physics would predict, people who consume fewer calories than they expend lose weight. Weird, eh?
At any rate, thanks again for the pointer. Great stuff.
Sam MacDonald