Sugar prevents weight loss
It tends to be perceived irresponsible to eat yourself obese, but is it any less irresponsible to put sweeteners into every food?
During Xmass I kept dieting and measured things to keep in calorific deficit. It was premade casseroles, meat, same food as usual otherwise, bit of chocolate every once a while. I didn't specifically feel like I was overeating.
But didn't lose any weight.
Xmass went but the problem didn't go away. I had to cut fruits out entirely.
So during the 9 days after cutting sugar, I've lost nearly 4 kg (or 8 lbs). It was that kind of a "plateau". It's pretty clear where's the blame here.
Even if the sugar wouldn't calorifically exceed your limits, it may be able to still stop fat from being burned.
During the last 3 days I also dropped wheat products, vegetable oils, most premade food that might contain sugar, soy or corn products. I've read up these are inflammation causing products.
Based on what I've seen so far, I think I'm probably going to try get sugar to less than 5-10g/day, and keep it there. Some great and actual fruits seem to taste much better now anyway, and I need all tolerance for fructose off from sugar so that I can eat those fruits.
Avoiding artificial sweeteners as well
It seems that people are getting some sort of symptoms from even stevia sugar products out there. Purified stevia is a lot sweeter than sugar, so different vendors add their own additives in there to expand the volume of the product.
For these kind of reasons I've really steered out from artificially sweetened products, although those I find to be really hard to spot sometimes.
Food arms race
Once people figure out that vast majority of food industry products are really unhealthy for them, there will be bunch of companies sitting on useless inedibles they're unable to sell. You know, 1.07 billion metric tons of corn, 170 million metric tons of sugar, or 736 million metric tons of wheat nobody wants to eat. These are annually produced amounts of each, but you get the idea.
Food producers will try to relabel, refine and do every trick they know to get them to eat these things again.
Unfortunately these highly processed food ingredients are not suitable for anybody. You'll get ill if they succeed to double-cross you.