And I mean impossible as in, it statistically rounds down to zero. I'm starting this thread because I want someone to show me, with a study, that I'm wrong. Not anecdotal evidence. A study.
Because what I'm finding is when somebody does go from severely obese to thin, it's a freak medical occurrence, like surviving a brain tumor after being told it's inoperable. I can't find any study that says I'm wrong. Everyone who loses the weight gains it back within a few years. Everyone outside of a tiny fraction of a percent.
For instance,
this person did the math and found that 2 out of a 1,000 Weight Watchers customers actually keep the weight off permanently.
They wrote that in reaction to
this horribly written news story boasting about the success of Weight Watchers, based on a study supplied by Weight Watchers involving only their most successful customers. They realized that once you break through the numbers, you find that their definition of "success" is keeping 5% of your weight off permanently. So, you were 300 lbs? Congratulations, you are now 285, you look exactly the same, and WW considers you a rare success story.
I'm starting to think that this is the great secret of modern society: People who permanently beat obesity are like people who permanently beat cancer.
We all know of somebody who did it, but their stories are amazing and remarkable because they are so rare. It's miraculously curing an incurable condition.
This article really drives it home:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/magazine/tara-parker-pope-fat-trap.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all
For a formerly fat person, exercise has far less benefit, and food stores itself as fat at a much higher rate, than somebody of the same weight who has never been fat. It's a challenge that is effectively impossible to overcome.
Every study, even those trying to find the opposite, find the same thing. There is even an organization dedicated to tracking down those miracle stories - the kind of people who lost 70 pounds and kept it off for five years or more - and they've found several thousand... in a country with 100 million obese people.
All of them did it by becoming fanatics, and basically making weight loss their job. They can keep it off in the same way that some people can build an Eiffel Tower out of toothpicks. They become obsessive and devote all of their spare time and energy to the project.
For everyone else, it's physically impossible. The body has too many defense mechanisms. Everything in your evolution is fighting against you -- once you reach a certain weight level, it will not let you drop below it for long. Again, yes, you can permanently lose 15 pounds. If you were only 15 pounds overweight, you weren't fat. I'm talking going from fat to thin -- the kind of "before and after" weight loss the diet drugs promise in the ads, from 250 to 160, that kind of loss.
It basically doesn't happen. It is effectively impossible.
) and demonstrate how much sugar I consumed a day from drinks and foods with sugar cubes in a bowl 
. 
