A Diet Survey

I would like to get down to a healthy weight. So I am asking SG a very specific question:

What have you done that has moved you from an unhealthy weight to a healthy one?

To contextualize the question: There is a repeated pattern I have seen with many diets. The dieter relatively easily loses about 1/3rd of their excess weight, then the weight loss stops, no matter how much the dieter escalates conformance to the diet, until surrender.

And then people will pour out of the woodwork recommending this diet despite the fact it does not, in fact, work, making it completely impossible to discern through the noise what does and does not work.

I have personally done this with:

• Atkins
• South Beach
• “Just eat better”
• One Meal a Day and various fasting combinations
• A modification of the Croissant diet I’ve never shared with anyone because it did no better than this. But it did do this well, which just goes to show how low the bar for losing “a bit” of weight is. (This one was sooo promising. It cut my appetite way down with hardly any effort. But then the weight loss stopped.)
• The NAC protocol + the croissant variant. (Which did not promise weight loss, but seemed at least a theory worth checking.)

I’ve witnessed this with:

• Weight Watchers
• Noom
• Keto
• Paleo
• Stomach stapling. I know two people who had this done years ago. Maybe they lost 50%. But they’re both still obese.
• Veganism. (A few vegans do become skinny, but in a clearly unhealthy way. Most of them stay fat.)
• Several friends with unspecified diets probably covering a range of the rest of the options.

I do not believe I have ever in my life witnessed someone go from obese to a healthy weight, let alone hold it. They merely become less obese for a while, but still obese.

As a result, I do not have a way to get to a healthy weight. I only have dozens of ways of losing what seems to be the same 1/3rd over and over again. Sadly, it does not seem to be as easy as just doing 3 things that lose 1/3rd of the excess weight. I don’t need another way to lose that same weight.

So, I am searching for people who can positively answer the following questions:

1. Were you at least 50-75 pounds overweight, and into the “obese” categorization by the standard government BMI metrics?
2. Are you now no longer in the overweight category at all? Preferably having maintained it for some period of time? Even dipping into healthy is better than I know how to do but is still not really enough.
3. Since I don’t want to presume it’s all about diet, what activities got you to that point?

I would ask thaty you please do not answer in this thread if you can not answer #1 and #2 with “yes”. If you want to discuss some other diet that got you about 1/3rd of the way there, or that phenomenon in general, please quote-post and fork the thread. There’s no problem with that, it may be an interesting discussion on its own, but I’d like to not have that mixed in.