Can you get skinny by losing weight?

This is strange.  "Losing weight" is ubiquitously associated with a more attractive figure, skinny jeans, looking visibly trimmer.  And yet, "losing weight" refers to numbers on a scale! Stepping on a scale and seeing lower numbers does not relate linearly to a slimmer-looking body.  This is a strange phenomenon, when you think about it.  It is even stranger to associate what you are eating to the numbers on a scale to the way your body looks.  It is nonlinear, and I submit here is therefore the problem.

When you put your hand on a hot stove, the pain is immediate, and your reaction is immediate.  Linear response.  You are likely to remember it and associate it in your mind without difficulty.  But eating the next slice of pizza does not linearly translate into either the numbers on the scale the next morning, or the extra bulge on your hips somewhere down the line.  It is an intellectual knowledge of the sequence of events.  This lack of linear relationship is the bane of dieters, because when you feel hunger, you want to eat - it's biology.  Living in our current society, and being exposed to the ads on TV, the processed foods on the market, and your own emotions, when you eat to satisfy your hunger, you frequently eat more than you need, sometimes a lot more.  Much of our modern entertainment revolves around food.  You therefore find yourself celebrating, among friends, or watching a game on TV, all the while partaking of excess food, which eventually translates into higher numbers on the scale, and eventually becomes extra bulges on the hips.  It would be different if you went to a barbecue party, had an extra hamburger with all the trimmings, and immediately busted out of your pants.  Yes, that does sometimes happen, but I'm sure we have all attributed that to the discomfort of overeating - not to a permanent weight gain. 

Eating=Weight; Weight=Body Size

All the media efforts notwithstanding, it is very difficult to make a direct connection between eating and weight, or between weight and how I look.  The connection only exists intellectually.  It's what we've been taught.  The reality is that we are attempting to connect two things remote from each other: weight is quite a remote effect of how much and what we eat; and weight is also a remote measure of what our bodies look like. 

Consider, for example, the immediate effect you would get by putting your hand on an open flame.  Cause and effect would occur instantly, and the learning "curve" would not even be a curve.  But if you don't like the way your body looks, changing it requires a leap of faith.  You are asked to suspend your instincts and trust in some intellectual instruction to manipulate your eating.  Eating is to a large degree instinctual, and retraining your style of eating takes a great deal of effort.  But the most difficult part is to connect the dots: how much food you are eating+what kind of food you are eating=how much you weigh=what your body looks like.

This is a stretch, by any account.  Is there an easier, softer way?  I suppose the only way is to restructure our thinking, our attitudes and our language.  It is through language that we communicate words (and ideas/concepts) such as "losing weight" when what we mean is "have a smaller waist."  This is quite inadequate, of course, because we are doing battle with our instincts to try to achieve something physical that matches an outer model.