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Notes -
It is actually theoretically possible to quit by going cold turkey. At least if you start morbidly obese. To be clear I am not recommending it, but the canonical case was Angus Barbieri. He supposedly lost 276 lbs, and kept most of it off, at least at the five year follow up.
There is some clinical research on protein-sparing modified fasts, which seems to be more sound from a physiological point of view. In early research there was a realitvely high incidence of death, possibly from mismanagement of the amino-acid profile or (preexisting?) heart disease. It seems like it would probably be hard to get an institutional review board to go along with a large scale study now, hard to fund a high quality study, and you would have perpetual problems with compliance.
From the applied side, this is something like what competitive bodybuilders have been doing in the last weeks of contest prep for some time. That is a world known for disordered eating, so I only point this out to say that it works physiologically, not that it's necessarily a good idea.
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