1 new of 41 responses total.
I've been thinking some of why my anecdotal evidence of friends being able to lose weight and maintain their loss is somewhat at odds with your statistics. I mean, I sure have more friends who have effectively maintained weight loss than friends who have hit the lottery jackpot. Some of it may be that they had serial-dieted without success. But along they way they'd learned some of what didn't work. So they stopped dieting and instead shifted to adapting long term weight loss behaviors - habits for a lifetime. If a researcher collected a group of dieters - they wouldn't be counted. They're not attending Weight Watchers or counting carbs or stocking their freezer with Jennie Craig. They've learned from "diets" and moved on, finding a degree of success. I'm not sure research is capturing their weight loss success. But I agree with you that obese people face discrimination and that for some, many even, significant change is not under their control for lots of reasons.
You have several choices: