[ggbjr]

this is very well known in the scientific community (which is one of the reasons it's unlikely to be published today). one of the key challenges in diet science is that what works for individuals may not be an ideal public health or clinical recommendation.

re your hypothesis, i don't know of any studies on your specific question (there aren't many people who keep the weight off -- the national weight control registry is following several thousand), but there are studies showing that people who weight cycle minimally (1-4 times) have lower all-cause mortality: http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2012/02/01/aje.k...

[ThrustVectoring]

My model of the obesity crisis is that it's fundamentally a mental-health issue, not a nutritional one. Food and eating is connected to your motivational and emotional centers on a deep and fundamental level. The actual mechanics of losing weight is fairly straightforward, but turning an over-eater into a healthy-eater isn't.

[MrTortoise]

The problem is do you consider the minds reactions to hormones mental or nutritional? You can have plenty of 'willpower' but if your chemistry craves balance then you have blurred boundaries into saying its both, neither and that they are broken abstractions.

[ThrustVectoring]

"Willpower" isn't the answer, either. Like, long-term expenditure of willpower isn't a good solution to any problem. I hope I didn't imply that that was my proposed solution.

Like, what I'm saying is that if you replaced the decision-making process for eating with an algorithm designed to bring someone to a specific body weight, that would basically solve the obesity problem.

To answer your question more directly, there may be nutritional solutions to the mental problems that lead to over-eating.