Long-term weight loss research?

I saw yet another article today talking about how almost all diets cause weight loss over a 6 month period, but they pretty much all show none of that weight loss maintained by the 12 month mark. The diets mentioned were keto, mediterranean, all that stuff. The main difference I see heavily discussed with fasting is that weight not only gets lost, but it *stays* lost, due to the hormonal adjustments and so on. If this is true, it should be pretty easy to test for, right? Just have a couple groups of people, with one group doing Keto, one group doing Mediterranean, one just doing pure calorie counting, etc--and match that up against the other group that does fasting. Measure the weight loss not just at the end of the diet period, but again after 12/18/48/etc months. That said: I can't find any research like that, that comes back to the test subjects after a long period of time has passed, and checks whether the weight loss has been maintained. Has anyone seen any work like this?

Answer

Dr Fung talks about fasting helping to reset your bodies “set weight” (the weight your body thinks you should be), however this still requires a few years to do so. Most people I know that failed to keep weight off from their “diet” was simply because they went back to eating what they did before, that made them overweight in the first place.If you want to lose weight, go on a diet, but if you want to keep it off, then you need to stick to it for life.Think of it like learning a new language. After you’ve put in all this time and effort to learn it, you still need to exercise that knowledge to keep it imprinted in your brain. If you don’t use it or keep practicing, you’re going to forget everything you learnt.

Answer

if you want to maintain weight loss, you need to stick with the diet long term. That’s a no brainer. It doesn’t matter the kind of diet, if you eat like a pig, you end up a pig.

There is literally no diet in the world in which you can eat maccas 6 times a day followed by ice cream and manage to stay thin, except the cancer diet.