[lm28469]

> But their own numbers show that people regain the weight after they start eating other foods again: "On average, people gained back most of the weight they lost."[2]

Every single diet suffers from that, because you don't need a diet, you need a life style and as the name implies it, it has to be sustained for your whole life

[Aurornis]

The difference is that fad diets are unsustainable from the start. Technically someone could try to continue a diet like this indefinitely if it had sufficient nutrients, but most people will get sick of a fad diet after a while and revert to their prior eating habits.

The difference between a fad diet and a good diet is that a good diet is designed to be sustainable from the start. The goal of a good diet is to reset your eating habits into a healthier set of foods that you can still enjoy and continue eating regularly indefinitely.

[zoklet-enjoyer]

A potato lifestyle

[jwestbury]

It's important to recognise that even with "lifestyle" changes, weight loss is often not sustainable. Here's a quote from a review of the literature undertaken in 2018[0]:

> In a meta-analysis of 29 long-term weight loss studies, more than half of the lost weight was regained within two years, and by five years more than 80% of lost weight was regained

Or, to offer some anecdata, I lost 60 pounds in early 2012. I started working out. In 2015, I hiked every weekend, totaling more than 400 miles of distance covered, and more than 20 miles of elevation gain. And in 2016, while training for a trek in Peru, I injured myself and was unable to exercise for quite a while. I gained about 20 pounds back, but then stabilised -- until COVID, when high stress and a forced change in dietary habits (I couldn't go to the grocery store easily, and many foods were routinely out of stock) means I ultimately gained back the remainder of my weight, some eight and a half years after losing it. In particularly extreme examples,

Generally speaking, weight loss as a goal is destined to fail. Even when significant habitual changes are effected, the reality is that people's metabolism is hugely impacted by their early life. Furthermore, weight loss has often been found to increase levels of hunger[1], which makes it incredibly difficult to sustain. And in extreme cases -- such as the Minnesota Starvation Experiment[2] -- low-calorie diets (in this case, actually about 1600 calories a day) can cause persistent decreases in both basal metabolic rate and satiety, which means those who have lost weight will not only find it harder to maintain the weight due to a decreased caloric requirement, but also because of increased hunger.

The tl;dr here is that sustained weight loss may be possible, but the best bet is probably weight loss which occurs over a period of a decade or more, because any faster and you start to risk some paradoxical outcomes which will make it increasingly difficult to maintain.

0. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5764193/ 1. https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/weight-loss-le... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Starvation_Experimen...