Amen, Liz. The research is showing it is incredibly hard or impossible for many people to just get the weight off at will. Lots of people can do it once, then their metabolism 'learns' soemone may starve it, and is resistant to that kind of diet ever again.

Controlled studies have been done on healthy young guys to test the 'just-eat-less' premise and guess what, it doesn't hold water as everyone assumed it would.

In the real world, there are lots of women eating 900 calories a day and doing workouts who gain weight if they ever eat 1200.

The 1000-pound category of patients are now being studied and they are finding mechanisms in them that are packing fat cells even as their muscles and other tissues are not getting what they need.   Others with very uneven fat distribution have been studied; on 600-calorie diets fat cells in the hips were still working on overdrive to hold fat while the rest of the body was undergoing starvation.

Before I have to pay penalties for my overweight, I would like the jackass medical establishment which has done a horrible job over the years of studying bariatric problems to compensate me for the damage done to me and my family by following their stupid advice over the years. Evidence is mounting that the diabetes epidemic is very likely the result of the idiotic high-carb diets we've all been preached for years (yes, and the fact that we don't walk anywhere any more).