I think it should be treated just like any other chronic condition, you try to be as healthy as possible within the paradigm. If you want to lose weight, great, but people starting to lose weight need to understand that the habits they are using will likely have to be permanent fixtures for the rest of their life. Returning to a "normal" lifestyle is how the weight was gained in the first place after all.

Irresponsible to whom? You are the one advocating for this exact kind of analysis, not me, I merely obliged you.

Your stated solutions below are 'ban food' and 'education'.

If you know anything about how fat people are treated at doctor's offices, 'stop being fat, eat less' is probably the first and last thing they hear at any checkup.

It's not working. ' Ban food' is intriguing, but I don't believe it's practical for, I hope, obvious reasons.

- I lose around 2 lbs per week at 1500 calories/day. I don't care about your anecdotal data. Show me your CICO analysis.

Do you control for water and glycogen loss?

What about exercise, what's your basal metabolic rate? etc...

It's irresponsible to say that you need to be on a 700 calorie diet for 3-4 years to lose 120 pounds. That's so far from reality that it's irresponsible.

> Do you control for water and glycogen loss?

I lose more in the first week or so to what I assume is water retention. After that it settles into 2lbs/week.

> What about exercise, what's your basal metabolic rate? etc...

I wear a fitbit and allow myself more calories if I run (based on what it tells me). None of this needs to be perfect. If you're off by 100-200 calories a day, you'll still lose weight.

None of that matters, though. I have my number: 1500 calories. If I'm not losing enough, I'll lower it 100 at a time. Or if I'm losing too much, I'll raise it 100 at a time. That adjusts for BMR and mistakes in my calorie counting. Finding my exact BMR is wasted effort.

I said previously, I don't care about your personal diet, as it has little to do with how the CDC should dictate policy. The diet I described was a crash diet.

'education is a pointless endeavor'. You are putting words in my mouth, my point, of course, was that knowing about CICO doesn't change the fact that weight loss takes a long time, is hard, and requires resources that many don't have access to. A word of warning, keeping it off is also hard when you've been fat, so prepare for that.

Since we won't speak again, I want you to interrogate why you are emotionally engaged with this topic. I had similar thoughts about how other people should behave when I discovered how to lose the weight, but realized only later that those thoughts made me view all fat people in a dim light, that it was ok to assume bad things about them, to view them as in need of 'education' like you advocate for.

If you ignore everything else I've said, please think about the perspective of a person who has lost 120 lbs, but is still 280lbs, and are receiving their 100th unsolicited lecture about CICO from someone like you. Most fat people go through that, from elementary school to adulthood in the US. It's pointless, they definitely don't want to hear about that from a stranger.