An obese person who strictly eats at his/her maintenance metabolic needs will stay obese forever. That is a fact. Your weight is not a testament to the quality of the food you eat or your level of exercise, only to the number of calories you absorb. That's -99%- of it.
Knowing that, I'd much rather have a person with 30% bodyfat who makes senseful health choices -while maintaining their weight- than a person with 15% bodyfat who doesn't care much. That's it. It was simply a response to the "calories in calories out" approach that PL talked about, which in this regard does not make sense when it's not accompanied with a healthier lifestyle in general (eating fast food 10 times a week instead of 12 to lose weight is not my definition of healthy choices).
People should focus on eating well rather than eating less, and if they do, the weight will probably come off by itself eventually anyway.
(I agree, though, that joints damage occurrence is probably higher in obese people. We'd have to see if exercise can counterbalance that.)
Honestly we are probably more in agreement than not. However, I dislike a lot of your phrasing, and some of your reasoning.
"Your weight is not a testament to the quality of the food you eat or your level of exercise, only to the number of calories you absorb"
There are certainly some researchers who feel this way. However, it is not as though the number of calories absorbed are static, nor as though they are unrelated to the number burned. The amount you eat and demand changes with age and activity level (at the very least..just two of many, many examples). Or perhaps marathoners don't eat more on long days?
The physiology of eating goes far further than the "second law of thermodynamics," despite the tendency of many to denigrate everything to "calories in, calories out."
What explanation do you offer for the successes on the Atkins diet? That diet essentially restricts carbohydrates, and nothing else. While to my knowledge it has proven no more successful than other diets in clinical trials, this is generally due to adherence. Even a few successes on such a diet lead make the assumption "99% of it is calories in," with no attention to the content, questionable.
The 30% bodyfat vs 15% bodyfat question I would hesitantly agree with, provided the 30% fat person was exercising. I would also agree that we have focused a little too hard on weight loss...but this is because, frankly, that is what is important to many people.
I agree with the sentiment of "eating well rather than less," but what exactly the hell does "eating well" mean?
Is it a Mediterranean diet, as the AHA likes to claim? Perhaps a vegetarian one? Vegan? Low carb? Low fat (as the AHA used to claim)? Until we can answer those questions definitively, which we certainly cannot at the moment, is it really ethical to say that people should alter their lives in order to follow unproven diets?
We certainly have done so in the past, and the results were questionable. I would rather not continue to pursue each fad of "healthy eating" as it comes and goes.
However, I do agree we should start focusing on mortality/other hard outcomes more than weight.
