There is excuse-making and then there is an entire damned industry that works its level best to asset-strip you to your underwear so your fat ass (and the rest) hangs out.

“The key point is that you can be on TV, you can lose enormous amounts of weight, you can go on for six years, but you can’t get away from a basic biological reality,” said Dr. Schwartz, who was not involved in the study. “As long as you are below your initial weight, your body is going to try to get you back.”

Well sure, if your "path" to weight loss is to eat damn near nothing (e.g. starve) and run your metabolic demand through the ceiling by engaging in extremely intense exercise.

Look at the quotes: "It's hard.  The cravings are there."

But the kernel of truth is right here:

“There is a lot of basic research we still need to do,” said Dr. Margaret Jackson, who is directing a project at Pfizer. Her group is testing a drug that, in animals at least, acts like leptin, a hormone that controls hunger. With weight loss, leptin levels fall and people become hungry. The idea is to trick the brains of people who have lost weight so they do not become ravenous for lack of leptin.

Pfizer wants to sell you a drug, of course.

But what if you learned that hunger is largely regulated by leptin, leptin response is largely mediated by insulin levels, and it is what you eat, not how much, that is almost-entirely responsible for insulin levels?

Guess what: That all happens to be true.

What is being discussed here is that the contestants on the show The Biggest Loser basically poisoned their metabolism through the path they engaged in -- that is, extreme caloric restriction coupled with intense exercise.

But the "big lie" is right here:

“What was surprising was what a coordinated effect it is,” Dr. Proietto said. “The body puts multiple mechanisms in place to get you back to your weight. The only way to maintain weight loss is to be hungry all the time. We desperately need agents that will suppress hunger and that are safe with long-term use.”

Agents, of course, means drugs.  Yeah that's a great idea -- hand over $10,000 a year forever to someone for a pill that will probably have side effects that destroy your life (eventually.)

Look at what they had these people eat:

His routine went like this: Wake up at 5 a.m. and run on a treadmill for 45 minutes. Have breakfast — typically one egg and two egg whites, half a grapefruit and a piece of sprouted grain toast. Run on the treadmill for another 45 minutes. Rest for 40 minutes; bike ride nine miles to a gym. Work out for two and a half hours. Shower, ride home, eat lunch — typically a grilled skinless chicken breast, a cup of broccoli and 10 spears of asparagus. Rest for an hour. Drive to the gym for another round of exercise.

Mother of God will you stop killing yourself?

Look folks, fat in the diet is not fat on the body.  This sort of "diet" is nothing other than starvation and it's stupid.

What's the problem?  Right here:

His slow metabolism is part of the problem, and so are his food cravings. He opens a bag of chips, thinking he will have just a few. “I’d eat five bites. Then I’d black out and eat the whole bag of chips and say, ‘What did I do?’”

Get the damned chips out the house!

Oh, and the rest of the carbs.

You're not sick because you're fat (and cut the "shaming" crap, facts just are) you're fat because you're sick and you're sick because you refuse to stop eating things that make you that way.

Look folks, I know you don't want to hear it because you're all looking for a drug and an excuse.

That's why you lose 10, 20 or 30lbs, then put it all back on with interest.

You can't stop eating pasta, potato chips, pizzas and bread.... Really?  You're willing to trade being fat and ultimately developing diabetes causing you to have your toes chopped off one by one as they turn gangrenous, along with losing your eyesight and ultimately your life, rather than getting the damned potato chips out of your house and not calling Papa Johns or Dominos?  REALLY?

You do understand that your body's metabolic system is capable of handling quite the level of insult before it breaks, right?  That you "pass" the common glucose test (OGTT) or have a normal (or marginal) A1c today does not mean you have not accumulated decades of such damage and that while there is a test to determine this (OGTT+insulin assay) it's expensive and insurance will not pay for it since it doesn't diagnose a disease that is occurring now.

You do understand that the majority of adults in America and damn near everyone over the age of 60 are metabolically compromised by decades of eating fast carbohydrates and vegetable oils, even if you do not today show evidence of diabetes and related diseases, and that if you are overweight, even only somewhat, or obese it is a virtual certainty you're one of them irrespective of age, right?

I've been there and done this over the space of a couple of decades.  I too poisoned myself because I was ignorant and believed that if I ate fewer animal fats, more vegetable oils and more carbohydrates while simply exercising more and eating less I'd lose weight and keep it off -- along with avoiding said disease.

Everyone who told you this either didn't know what the hell they were talking about or was lying.  The results were the same as they are for most of you -- slowly but inexorably increasing body weight.

Then I changed what, not how much, I ate and my body's regulatory system healed over time.  Is it completely healed?  I'm sure it's not, and if I was to go back to eating how I used to eat all the weight I lost and probably more would come right back on -- and quite quickly too.

But guess what?  You can do it too.  I don't care how fat you are now or how long you've been fat.  I don't care if you've yo-yo dieted before, or engaged in some sort of extreme attempt to lose weight.

You're overweight because you have poisoned the regulatory systems in your body that control your desire to eat.  You almost-certainly poisoned them unintentionally but whether it was intentional or not does not matter; what matters is that it happened and unless you change what you eat the damage will continue to accrue over time and at some point it is very likely it will manifest itself as clinically-diagnosed disease.

To succeed in allowing your body to repair itself to the degree it can, however, you are going to have to do two things: Stop making excuses and stop looking for answers in a damned pill bottle -- or a surgeons office.

The answer is found in what, not how much, is in your pantry and refrigerator.

Read this article.  Bookmark it, print it, whatever.

Go through your house -- pantry, fridge and freezer.  Throw anything on the "don't eat list" in the trash can and never let it come back into your home or pass your lips when you are somewhere other than at home.

Go to the store once you've thrown everything away on the "don't eat list" and re-stock your fridge with things on the DO eat list.  Note that almost none of them will go in the pantry because the pantry is for things that are shelf-stable and processed.  A few will go on the counter that are going to get eaten within a couple of days but the rest go in either the fridge or freezer.

Don't tell me that you can't do it because you can do it.  You can do it when you're home and you can do it when you're eating away from home.  If you absolutely must have a sub sandwich when out go to Jimmy Johns and have them make it as a wrap; they will, in lettuce -- or if you want then go to Subway and have them make your "sub" as a salad (same thing but with the lettuce chopped up and thus less-convenient to eat "on the go.")

If you're overweight your pants will shortly try to fall off, but more-importantly your body knows how to regulate its caloric intake if you stop poisoning the mechanisms that control it.  When you reach an appropriate weight - which is not one where you're "large", but rather a body mass that looks like a normal, not-fat person in every case (no, you're not "special" in that regard: You're not "big-boned", you're fat) the weight loss will stop all on its own without you making a conscious decision to do so.

Here's the thing, however: You can't get there from here if you "diet" because as soon as you stop "dieting" you will go back to poisoning your body's metabolic signalling system and the weight will come right back on.  In fact it may come back on faster than ever because some of the damage you've accumulated is probably permanent.

This is not a matter of "blame" it is a matter of fact -- whether you undertook what you did because you were stupid, you got bad advice from so-called "professionals" or any other cause doesn't matter.

You are an adult and thus you are responsible for the outcomes that occur when you listen to various people no matter who they are.

If you take someone's advice and it doesn't work but you keep doing what you were told would work why in the hell would you keep listening to them?

Look folks, do it for 30 days.  That's all.  I'm no doctor but I can tell you what works because it did after a couple of decades of the "conventional advice" not working.  I can also point you to the comments here from others who also had it work with some of them having ridiculously dramatic results when it came not so much as to weight (in that short amount of time) but metabolic markers of serious disease such as their blood sugar.  This isn't something that was a "fad" or an undertaking that I "recently" did and thus can't give you any sort of honest answer on whether the weight I lost will stay off.

You want to know how many people I've run into who have actually done this and not had it work?  Zero.  Every one of the people I've been acquainted with that failed has admitted they just didn't do it.  They ate the pasta.  Or the potatoes.  They called Dominos and ate the pizza.  Or they just "had to have" the pie.  Or sugar in their coffee.  They had the craving, they had a bad day exercising and had to "add back" some carbs (even though they were less than a week into it), and on and on.  Rather than tough it out for a few days, literally, knowing it would go away in a few days to a couple of weeks (like a cold does) if they just kept at it, they didn't.

It didn't fail -- they simply didn't do it and they admit it.

I changed my lifestyle in this fashion in 2011.  I used no drugs, no doctors and no surgical interventions -- nothing other than what I stuffed in my pie hole and had in my house.  I did it despite having a kid at home at the time who refused to give up her Doritos, M&Ms and similar.

Despite the bad stuff being present I didn't eat them, choosing instead to reach for the broccoli or piece of leftover zero-carb roast.

If you're one of the millions of Americans who have heard that it's all "hormonal", that you need "help", that you have a "damaged" metabolism and "it's not your fault" or that nothing other than invasive surgery or drugs (and perhaps not even then) will make a long-term difference what do you have to lose by trying?

Do you really think that a month or two of changing what you eat is going to do some critical damage that all those years of piling on the pounds hasn't?  Are you really too lazy to go spend under $50 for instrumentation that will (largely) last virtually forever to test a hypothesis on your body and your metabolism and give you objective results by which to measure whether it works or doesn't?  I don't think there's anywhere in this country that's more than a 20 minute drive from a WalMart these days and if there is Amazon covers every US address within a couple of days (even without Prime) so there's simply no excuse other than willful refusal.

You can't argue with objective numbers so if you don't have them because you won't go buy the $20 worth of stuff to obtain them in the privacy of your own home where nobody else can ever see them then the only excuse is that you are consciously refusing to put such a change in eating habits to an objective, personal test.

If you're happy with being overweight or obese, or worse you expect someone else to either fix it or give you a pill then shut your pie hole and deal with the consequences of your choice.  A choice that, I remind you, given our corrupt and extortionate medical system will bankrupt you as well as having a high probability of making you both sick and ultimately dead.

Or, for nearly zero money you can change, what, not how you eat -- not as a "diet" but as a lifestyle and as a side effect it is highly like that your pants will fall off.

Your choice.