Ballooney

Swallowing an inflatable device to take up room in your stomach so you can starve more easily, really? And the outcome of that would be different from just starving on your own, how?

At the end of the 16 weeks, the patients were encouraged to eat a Mediterranean diet to try to maintain their weight loss.

Maintain starvation, with what technique, procedure, process, stimulus? What modus, what pathway, what model? A placebo is defined by no active effect. This is all no active effect, just the acting out of how someone thinks metabolic function ought to work, but does not. And because they can't let go, we aren't allowed to.

No one really talks about how devastating it can be to regain weight loss so achingly slowly and punitively. It is literally Sisyphean;

In Greek legend Sisyphus was punished in Hades for his misdeeds in life by being condemned eternally to roll a heavy stone up a hill. As he neared the top, the stone rolled down again, so that his labour was everlasting and futile.

People know this though don't they? That's the whole point of it these days....punishment for sin.