Can you lose weight on a low-calorie diet?

Not if your body thinks you're starving...

Can you lose weight on a low calorie diet?

Are you following a strict low-calorie diet, but not getting the results you are hoping for...and it seems like you only need to THINK of food to put weight on?

The reason for this is that your body learns to function at the level of fewer calories, saving its fat stores. When you restrict your calorie intake and try to persuade your body to burn its fat stores as fuel, you create an artificial environment of famine for yourself, and your body compensates by becoming more thrifty with every calorie.
Your metabolism, (the rate at which you burn food for your body's activities) slows down. This means that while initially you may lose pounds and some fat, you are training your body to function on less food and fewer calories.

Everything else remaining equal, if you ever start eating more calories, it will be stored as fat. You are training your body to save the fat for survival.

Which creates the discouraging effect of after going off the diet, you will gain fat faster than you did before you ever started dieting.

Your body cannot distinguish "diet" from "starvation"

Since your muscles burn calories even while you're resting, you gain weight more easily eating fewer calories.

So dieting creates a vicious cycle of eating less, but gaining more easily from every morsel you do eat.

What is the answer, then? Am I doomed to be fat forever?