We have many unsuccessful treatments that work for a small percentage of patients. That's why we measure treatments by effectiveness rather than identifying existence proofs that it worked for someone.

You're really missing the point. Every patient is unique. That's why competent healthcare providers take a step therapy approach and try cheaper, lower-risk treatments first before moving on to more expensive and riskier medication or bariatric surgery.

You seem to have misread my posts as saying that healthcare providers should immediately move to medication rather than try dietary intervention. I didn't say that, I didn't imply that, I didn't even think it.

What I did say is that we are increasingly learning that overeating is a very complex and life-threatening medical concern that often cannot be solved through dietary intervention. Even people who may die if they don't adhere to a diet frequently have difficulty adhering to one. Saying that there are "existence proofs" that diets sometimes they work is a terrible response.

My view is that we should treat diet as one possible medical treatment, and evaluate it apples-to-apples (in terms of efficacy and side effects) against more recent FDA-approved treatments. And now that we've seen how much impact those treatments can have -- and particularly how critical the GLP-1 mechanism is to the sustainability of weight-loss interventions -- we should work our asses off to find more and better treatments that treat overeating as a health condition rather than a question of mind-over-matter.

You seem extremely attached to your position, to the point where defending your position required you to declare that my relatives "were eating a bunch of other stuff when you weren't looking."