I've moved away slightly from SJW attitudes on various matters, since starting to read LW, Yvain's blog and various other things, however, I've actually moved closer to SJW attitudes to weight, since researching the issue. The fact that weight loss attempts hardly ever work in the long run, is what has changed my views the most.

Link to twin study. A quick scan (I don't have time to read it in full right now, but I will later) suggests they used twins of the same sex, and they also compared BMI not weight, which controls for height.

I think the problem is that maintaining a state on semi-starvation for the rest of one's life is very unpleasant and difficult, and is achieved by very few people:

“Those who doubt the power of basic drives, however, might note that although one can hold one’s breath, this conscious act is soon overcome by the compulsion to breathe,” Dr. Friedman wrote. “The feeling of hunger is intense and, if not as potent as the drive to breathe, is probably no less powerful than the drive to drink when one is thirsty. This is the feeling the obese must resist after they have lost a significant amount of weight.

Controlling for height and sex?

Well, the identical twin parts of the study would automatically control for height and sex :)

I've posted some exerpts from another possibly relevant article here:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/hpz/open_thread_june_1630_2013/96na

Genes take charge and diets fall by the wayside.

You need a New York Times account to read it, but setting one up only takes a couple of minutes. Here are some exerpts in any case.

Obese people almost always regain weight after weight loss:

So Dr. Hirsch and his colleagues, including Dr. Rudolph L. Leibel, who is now at Columbia University, repeated the experiment and repeated it again. Every time the result was the same. The weight, so painstakingly lost, came right back. But since this was a research study, the investigators were also measuring metabolic changes, psychiatric conditions, body temperature and pulse. And that led them to a surprising conclusion: fat people who lost large amounts of weight might look like someone who was never fat, but they were very different. In fact, by every metabolic measurement, they seemed like people who were starving.

Before the diet began, the fat subjects’ metabolism was normal — the number of calories burned per square meter of body surface was no different from that of people who had never been fat. But when they lost weight, they were burning as much as 24 percent fewer calories per square meter of their surface area than the calories consumed by those who were naturally thin.

Thin people who are forced to gain weight find it easy to lose it again:

...His subjects were prisoners at a nearby state prison who volunteered to gain weight. With great difficulty, they succeeded, increasing their weight by 20 percent to 25 percent. But it took them four to six months, eating as much as they could every day. Some consumed 10,000 calories a day, an amount so incredible that it would be hard to believe, were it not for the fact that there were attendants present at each meal who dutifully recorded everything the men ate.

Once the men were fat, their metabolisms increased by 50 percent. They needed more than 2,700 calories per square meter of their body surface to stay fat but needed just 1,800 calories per square meter to maintain their normal weight.

When the study ended, the prisoners had no trouble losing weight. Within months, they were back to normal and effortlessly stayed there.

The body's metabolism changes with weight loss and weight gain:

The implications were clear. There is a reason that fat people cannot stay thin after they diet and that thin people cannot stay fat when they force themselves to gain weight. The body’s metabolism speeds up or slows down to keep weight within a narrow range. Gain weight and the metabolism can as much as double; lose weight and it can slow to half its original speed.

Genes and weight:

.A few years later, in 1990, Dr. Stunkard published another study in The New England Journal of Medicine, using another classic method of geneticists: investigating twins. This time, he used the Swedish Twin Registry, studying its 93 pairs of identical twins who were reared apart, 154 pairs of identical twins who were reared together, 218 pairs of fraternal twins who were reared apart, and 208 pairs of fraternal twins who were reared together.

The identical twins had nearly identical body mass indexes, whether they had been reared apart or together. There was more variation in the body mass indexes of the fraternal twins, who, like any siblings, share some, but not all, genes.

The researchers concluded that 70 percent of the variation in peoples’ weights may be accounted for by inheritance, a figure that means that weight is more strongly inherited than nearly any other condition, including mental illness, breast cancer or heart disease.

googles Shangri La Man,I'll definitely try that before I try intermittent fasting. The only low carb diet I've looked at is Atkins, and it just sounds really unpleasant, but I'll look at paleo.

I think concentrating on improving social skills and learning to dress better are important. Regarding social skills, if you suffer from social anxiety, CBT, mindfulness and antidepressants work well. Apart from that, I don't really know, as my social skills improved without a great deal of effort, but good self help advice is probably the way to go. I also don't know a great deal about men's fashion, but googling "how to dress for overweight men" brings up lots of results. A word of caution though - after getting internet fashion advice check how things look with a friend!

I think losing weight is also good idea, but you may not be able to lose it sustainably, so doing other things as well is important. Recently, I've wanted to look better. I am going to try to lose weight (I don't have a great deal to lose, but I'd look better if I dropped a few kilos), but the first thing I did was buy some new clothes and get a new haircut.

Yes I would recommend these steps to guys interested in girls :). A lot of dating advice recommends them.

I've read on this site that you already have four girlfriend in a polyamorous relationship. Is that true? If it is, how did you achieve that without losing weight?

Some women prefer overweight men, and some don't mind dating overweight men. If I'm honest I'm more likely to be attracted to slimmer men (certainly most of the men I've dated are slimmer), however I have been attracted to fat guys in the past, if they have other attractive qualities (being smart, amusing, relaxed about sex, for instance).

I also think that people who hang out in kink spaces are more likely to have non mainstream sexual tastes. You are, I would think, more likely to find women who are really keen on fat guys (these women do exist) in these spaces. It's been my experience that in kinky and similar communities (e.g. the poly community) people (both men and women) who are not conventionally attractive are more likely to be sexually successful than they would be outside these communities.