Willpower works for me in all respects apart from food.
I like a glass of wine or a G&T, but I barely ever actually have one and have no trouble stopping at one glass when I do, even if everyone else is out to get drunk. That's easy. I used to really enjoy smoking (years ago, this was) and still occasionally miss it, but I am able to be around people who smoke and say no. That's a bit harder but I'm able to do it. I do a difficult and demanding job that is very hard to enter and requires me to work long and unpredictable hours and give up huge amounts of time that most people would consider their free time. I am able to be disciplined in my finances. You get the general picture. I am not an undisciplined person. The fact that I can do these things does not stop me from understanding why others may find it very hard not to drink to excess or smoke knowing that it's bad for them or may not want or be able to work in the way that I do.
I fully accept that many people are a healthy weight because they work at it, not because it comes naturally. But I have worked at it too, in many ways over many years, and I have lost substantial amounts of weight approximately every 8 or so years since my 20s. I cannot begin to tell you the amount of mental and physical resources that I have devoted to losing weight, getting fitter, being healthy, and maintaining those gains over the last thirty years. It is not an exaggeration to say that most of my waking life as an adult has been focused on what I've eaten, what I want to eat now, what I'm going to eat when I will allow myself to eat, and how I feel about all of those things. (It's that internal chatter that MJ has turned off for me which has made it possible for me to eat less, although I like exercise and despite my size was already moving considerably more than most people I know).
Regardless of how I have approached weight loss - Weightwatchers, Slimming World, intermittent fasting, time restricted eating, low carb, Mediterranean, Paul McKenna, no UPF, straightforward calorie counting, several years of psychotherapy, CBT, non-Paul McKenna hypnosis sessions, even a form of music therapy, personal training - and how much I have lost using those methods (6 stone, 4 stone, 5 stone, etc, big numbers), I have not been able to maintain those losses for more than a few years. I don't think that I am a lazy or unconscientious person, or that I'm not sufficiently motivated, or that I am just too stupid to know that if I eat less and move around more I'll lose weight. I think that this particular thing, which I accept is hard is for you and requires you to make an effort, is - for whatever reason - harder for me to achieve, and I need extra help to do it. There may well be other things that I find doable that you would need extra help with, but this isn't one of them.
The statistics tell us that the overwhelming majority of people - like over 90% - who lose large quantities of weight will put it back on and more besides, so I'm also not a statistical outlier. Far from it. All of the evidence is that willpower is not the answer once you get obese. There is also evidence that a tendency to obesity is genetic: both of my parents were obese people from families that tended to obese and having been a very thin child I jumped from underweight to two stone overweight in the year I started my periods.
There are other reasons that I've identified in therapy for becoming obese in the first place that I won't share here because they're no one's business, but none of them are "I am a lazy thoughtless person who just sits around and stuff herself for fun".
As I have said earlier on this thread (with a link to a source as a starting point), our bodies literally do not recognise a state of "dangerously overweight" and have no mechanism to automatically reduce our weight from unhealthy to health, because for the vast majority of our collective history as a species the danger we have evolved to manage is that of not having enough food, not of having too much. Our weight set point goes up every time we gain weight and does not go down when we lose weight, meaning that every time I lose 5 stone my body thinks it has experienced a famine and gathers all of its resources to get me to put that weight back on again. Our bodies do not know the difference between "there's a famine, I'm now 5 stone instead of 9 stone" and "I have lost 5 stone because I was too fat to be healthy at 14 stone and my healthy weight is 9 stone". It all feels like starvation to the body. That's because it's only in the last 30 seconds, from an evolutionary point of view, that retaining too much weight has become an existential threat.
So. I take MJ because nothing else so far has worked despite my best efforts. I pay for it myself because I can afford to and because apart from being very overweight I'm actually too healthy to qualify for an NHS prescription. Once I've reached my target weight I will phase it out; I agree that it's desirable to do without medication of any sort if you can. However, if I have the same difficulty maintaining a healthy weight as I have had in the past without MJ then I may go back onto it, because I'd rather be on MJ all my life than be obese all my life if that's the choice that's presented.
PS this isn't an AMA, it's a response to the many posters who have suggested that OP and others like her just haven't given good old willpower a good enough shot. We have. We really have.