The brain as something that can be "hardwired" is metaphor is a recent manifestation of the brain as a complex but completely deterministic dispatcher. To be clear, I wasn't implying that you said anything wrong about evolutionary drives and their influence on the difficulty of sticking to an eating regimen for weight loss - just that it's only one way of looking at the problem. For example, it is reasonably understood how to create behavioral avoidance using some ethically questionable as was explored in A Clockwork Orange or seen naturally through phobias, both of which undertook the implicit metaphor that the brain has firmware that if flashed hard and often enough can override "hardwiring". Then there are more benign models of child development which work under the general belief that the brain is a kind of tree, which through pruning and delicate bending of the branches over a long but influential period of life can set disposition permanently (this goes back to Aristotle at least).

What I took away from the article is that decisions with serious consequences such as judicial sentencing, managing our health, and massive government policies are made on overly confident assumptions that descriptive metaphorical explanations are definitive statements of reality. This happens because the convenience of language around the terms confuses people.