you have more opportunities to burn off those early-day calories than you do to burn off dinner calories. Also, Obamacare doesn't cover weight programs outside of a doctor's office, so that has dried up funds as well. Nearly everything you said about dieting and weight loss can be said about quitting smoking.

Like all group help programs ( Alcoholics Anonymous is the Ur-case) reliable statistics are hard to come by but it seems that their effectiveness is marginal: success is pretty close to a control group. Such programs are evaluated not by comparison to mythical fracture setting (your own experience tells you real fracture treatment can be more complicated) but by a cost/benefit against the alternatives.