People who have been maintaining for over 5 years, how have you done it?

I have been trying to lose weight for the last ~8 years or so, and it didn't really pay off. Quite the opposite, actually.

I (M/23/6'3") was 100kg (220lbs) at one point, then it became 105kg (231lbs), 112kg (247lbs) up to where I am now, at 124kg (273lbs). I tried going down, successfully losing 25kg (55lbs) at one point (CICO), only to gain it all back after a few months. This scares me a lot (where will it stop??).

To have a more scientific approach to weight loss, I began to read some books about obesity ( here and here - sorry, it's in french) and habits. The first book mentions some studies that found that a lot of diets resulted in an overall weight gain after 5 years (Anderson et al. (2001), Mann et al. (2007)):

• After 1 year, 67% of people successfully maintained their weight.
• After 2 years, they were only 44%.
• After 3 years, 32%.
• After 4 years, 28%.
• After 5 years, 21%.

Some studies were more optimistic, others were not.

Basically, what those books say, is that for someone to really lose weight and keep it off, one has to go through a process (in therapy) to lift what they call "restrictive cognition".
If someone tries to keep his diet under control, one day or another, that control will no longer be (for whatever reason - fatigue, depression, emotional distress, ...) and they will gain all the weight back, usually with a bonus. According to the authors, a better approach would be to "let nature do it's thing", and be more conscious of how we eat. We eat too much because we are too busy doing/thinking about something else to feel satiated.

What I say here is an oversimplification of the work those authors wrote, and I recommend reading those books if you can.

What I would like to get at is the following: I see a lot of people successfully losing weight, be it here at r/loseit, or at r/progresspics. I've got some progresspics myself. But what I don't see, is updates of those people at least 5 years after their diet. Did they fall into the above statistics (like I have)? Or did they successfully kept their weight off? If so, how did they manage to do it?

Thanks.

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