Even though we currently only seem to use medical interventions for more serious cases in which weight loss is necessary, I wonder if in the future, we'll start looking at these procedures as appropriate for even more moderate cases.
It just seems like despite the whole motivation/self help industry that tells us how we can just "change our lives" if we do XYZ, actual research into psychology reveals just how difficult it is to do that. Most people who try to diet and exercise fail to lose weight or gain it back. All the internet articles about how people did it, so we can do it to, are probably an example of survivor bias: they were all written by the minority of people who were successful.
So many things affect our willpower and motivation, from pre-frontal cortex metabolism, to hormones, to upbringing. There's even some research that says that your gut flora and intestinal microbiome has effects on your behaviour and appetite. It's really a gargantuan effort to act against those things. But physical interventions, like altering the hormones that affect hunger, or decreasing the maximum size of the stomach, can give people a fighting chance. Maybe in the future, medical interventions along these lines will be suggested even for people who only need to lose twenty pounds.
People are much more likely to be successful when we put them in circumstances that facilitate that success. Even something like getting people to recycle, that behavioural change doesn't happen just through PSAs telling people how important it is to do so. It happens when we make recycling easy and convenient for them to do, so that doing it expends little cognitive and physical energy.
Maybe we gotta work on some Skinner-esque Walden world where we manipulate the environment so that the chances of individual human success are maximized.
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