I'd like to add that I've got 11 stone to lose too.
In October I went to an obesity clinic for 3 weeks and lost no weight. The doctor and endocrinologist decided that my under-active thyroid was being overtreated and reduced my medication with informing/consulting my own endocrinologist. As a result in the last 2 weeks I put back the kilo I'd lost the first week.
The one thing I did find out was that I had an inflamed gall-bladder. The surgeon that removed it is also carving out a private clinic for weight loss surgery, and brushed aside my saying I needed to sort out my thyroid problem first, and even tried the hard sell on the gastric sleeve the night before the operation.
The week after my operation, I went to see my endocrinologist and she was very angry not to have been informed. She's changed my treatment to test a possible reason to not lose weight.
The eating plan at the clinic was the same for everyone 1600Cal/day except for those under 1m50 or over 1m90.
We had 40g of bread with an individual portion of butter and a low fat yoghurt/fromage frais for breakfast. Drinks were tea/coffee/chocolate - made with cocoa semi-skimmed milk and sweetener.
Lunch was 40g bread, 100g protein, 200g veg and 100g of potato/pasta/rice/couscous cooked weight, a 35g portion of cheese and a fruit dessert. We generally had some of the veg as a starter with a dressing made from a full-fat one diluted with water - so no sugar etc in it as with 'lite' ones.
Dinner was as for lunch, but we had soup as the starter. There was an allowance of 2 tbsp of oil to use in cooking - and the (ok small) roast chicken leg we had, still had crispy skin on it.
We were encouraged to eat slowly, and to taste what we ate.
Wednesdays we had a croissant for breakfast, and on Sundays the dessert was patisserie. You can tell it was a French obesity clinic
Since coming out at the end of October, I've lost 7kg due to the improved treatment, but the main point is that I'm eating a balanced diet. That's after an operation, and 2 post-operative hernias caused by my doing too much as I felt so well. So, for the last week I've been in too much pain to do much - apart from cake icing at 1am on Christmas Day, and up at 7am to do breakfast and start on lunch.
The dieticians maintained that there is much less risk of regaining weight if you limit your weight loss to no more than 1kg or 2lb a week, preferably half that. That way, it really does become a way of life - and not one of those 'lose 5 dress sizes to wear a size 8 bikini in 2 weeks' diets. Also, it can take 2 years for your skin to shrink back to fit you after you've lost weight.
Also, only weigh yourself once a week. I have to admit I was too heavy at 134kg for our scales and so bought some new ones that also show body fat, water, and muscle percentages.
So I now have a lovely spreadsheet that tots up the total difference as well as the weekly ones. I've even added a second sheet that turns the % of fat/muscle/water into an actual weight, so that I can see how much of the weight I've lost is fat. It also acts to show my endocrinologist how the changes in treatment is affecting my body composition.
You can swap the bread for potato and the other way round - they're standard diabetic exchanges. DH is eating the same meals, and although he doesn't really like couscous - except the one with spices in, he really likes the nutty taste of barley as a change from potato or pasta. 200g of veg takes an awful lot of chewing, too. We've found that Aldi/Lidl do very cheap packs of frozen mixed veg - which work out a lot cheaper than buying different fresh veg, and save the time for chopping/peeling/slicing etc.
Also, the blood tests I had before going to the clinic, show that I was massively deficient in Vitamin D, which has been implicated in the inability to lose weight.
I've been watching the programmes set in the Sunderland hospital, and was nearly in tears watching the part about the woman who was raped at either 6 or 8 years of age, but who has had no psychiatric/psychological help to deal with the trauma, just almost rail-roaded into a gastric bypass. There was another woman who just managed to lose enough weight on her own to qualify by eating a completely unbalanced diet, so that she was going into the operation malnourished.
I think in particular if someone becomes overweight due to psychological problems then any operation is just treating the symptoms and not the underlying cause.
Finally, I have known the wife of an obesity specialist for over 30 years. He worked with John Howard who developed the Cambridge diet, and used to prescribe to his patients at a university hospital. There was a book in the 1970s called 'pure white and deadly' by, I think John Yudkin, who was a biochemist. Before calorie counting became all the rage, reducing refined carbohydrate was the main recommendation. I rang her, almost feeling a bit in the wrong for refusing the surgeon's recommendation, and she told me that her late husband was dead against surgery as a quick-fix solution, and to avoid it at all costs.