It’s also worth pointing out that Guyenet thinks this mechanism is not easy to reverse. When I was 15 years old, I decided to become a strict vegan, which lead me to eat food that was quite a bit less palatable compared to what I was used to. More than one year afterwards, however, I still had an intense craving for cheese; it was clear that my brain had not yet forgotten some of its old patterns of thinking about food.
Guyenet suspects that our brain’s weight set point might never go down dramatically after living long enough in the modern world, even if we eventually stop eating palatable food altogether. If true, this would make his theory harder to test, and again, his theory would earn a penalty for being more unfalsifiable, but at the same time, we should be clear about what observations his theory strongly predicts, and rapid weight loss on unpalatable diets is just not one of them.
I feel like one should distinguish between “the cravings are hard to reverse on an unpalatable diet” with “the weight is hard to reverse on an unpalatable diet”. At least in my experience, I ate less when I was on an unpalatable diet, so I think it works for weight loss. The continued cravings seem more mediated by an information-based thing to me, like essentially being the knowledge that much better food is available. Of course this is not easily reversible.
I feel like one should distinguish between “the cravings are hard to reverse on an unpalatable diet” with “the weight is hard to reverse on an unpalatable diet”. At least in my experience, I ate less when I was on an unpalatable diet, so I think it works for weight loss. The continued cravings seem more mediated by an information-based thing to me, like essentially being the knowledge that much better food is available. Of course this is not easily reversible.