Get back to me in a couple years. Those people will be even fatter than before. Starvation diets only work on a temporary basis. A successful diet entails a PERMANENT change in behavior.
Importantly, this is not used as a diet, but was based on the idea that the islets of Langerhans that produced insulin were blocked by fat.
It had long been assumed that the islets were dead or had stopped producing insulin permanently. However, on this strict, acute starvation diet, once the fat was gone, the diabetes was reversed and they started producing insulin again.
And it is much harder to become morbidly obese if you have adequate supplies of insulin.
While I agree that a typical starvation diet won’t work and soon the people will regain the weight, this can now be said for two reasons: that the starvation diet wasn’t long enough, or strict enough.
That is, if they ate more than 600 calories a day, which they would typically do on a normal weight loss diet, and/or the diet just made them lose weight, not dissolve the fatty deposits blocking their Islets, their insulin levels would not increase, and so when they ate normally again, they would gain the weight back quickly.
So the scientists designed an eight week, 600 calorie a day diet as being fast enough and strict enough to do the trick.
That diabetic reversal weight loss is not just a function of eating less over an extended period of time, but that time itself is part of the equation.