Obesity is not eating too much, it's eating bad, highly processed foods. I doubt somebody can get obese by eating too much salad or chicken. It's not as simple as forcing everybody to higher prices or starving them.
- the time of the day you eat it (you will more likely store things if you eat it late than early in the morning due to your homonal cycle)
- the duration on which you eat it (the infamous 9 hours popularized by dr rhonda patrick)
- what you mix. Eating the same amount of calories in pure fat, or in a mix of 50% fat and sugar will not result in the same process by the liver.
- insulin sensibility. Which is influence by the quality of your food. E.G: how much sugar it contains.
- ability to process said food, again influenced by the state of irritation of your intestine and your microbiome, and hence influenced by the quality of your food. E.G: adult can get irritated intestines by intaking dairy product after they lost their childhood ability to proess it as well.
I know it's a convenient shortcut to say "calories in, calories out", especially since it's easy to demonstrate (the anecdotal Twinkie diet made us all think). But if we keep repeating that, we are not helping people to lose weight. Dieting has a very low success rate because of the solely focus on the calorie count, while using the informations above as well lead to less rebound and frustration in my experience.
I'm also not aware of any study (though I haven't looked very hard) that shows intermittent fasting results in greater energy consumption (and hence lower fat gain / greater fat loss) except by making it somewhat easier to eat less.
[1] https://freetheanimal.com/2018/02/taues-peter-strikes.html
For example, adding an apple between meals helping women to lose weight.
This is true but without explaining the issue. Gary Taubes compared it to asking why a theater is over capacity, and getting the answer "because more people entered than exited." Well, yes, but why?
You're at a healthy weight because you don't eat more calories than you need in a day. I'm obese because I do. But those facts don't explain why you don't and I do. It probably isn't because you count calories more diligently.
It isn't that you eat too many calories, its that your body hoards to many. Chronic exercise "helps" in the short term, but just causes long term damage, and your body just makes you want to eat more in response.
The trick is not how much you eat, but what you eat. Same with carbs, not how much, but what. Stick with nutrient dense foods (which pretty much means whole, fresh, goods, despite how much that is associated with a certain crowd), and your body just finally lets go and lets you lose weight.
For me, I went strictly Paleo for a year, not even low carb. Over a year and a half, I went from 340 to 183. I made sure I didn't decrease caloric intake (~2000 calories a day), nor increase caloric burn. According to common (but woefully incorrect) knowledge, I'm clearly lying, and I still weigh 340, yet, I don't.
Stripping out grains, refined sugars, dairy, legumes, refined oils, other refined products, and replacing it with fresh meat, vegs, moderate fruit, coconut and olive oil, while not decreasing calories, still helped me lose weight.
Healthcare sets people up to fail and then blames the victim. Its nuts.
It is true that metabolism varies by individual, and it's also an unfortunate truth that people who were obese and get their weight down to a level that the medical community deems healthy will have a slower metabolism than most naturally skinny people. But there is no chance that you were maintaining a 2000 calorie diet before you started losing weight.
What is also true is that most people do not properly estimate the number of calories they consume each day. I certainly have a hard time doing it - the only real way is to prepare all of your food yourself, or buy prepackaged food that you can measure accurately. I guarantee you were eating much more than you thought you were.
I don't have a reference handy, but I have read studies that show that when people self-report calorie consumption from memory they tend to underestimate by a large margin, reporting in the vicinity of 50-70% of actual consumption.
You can't get closer than 10% accuracy given that nutritional labels can be off by that much, and you aren't getting that unless you are making all your own food and weighing everything with a food scale.
A restaurant meal can vary by hundreds of calories based on how much dense fat like oil or butter is in it, and look identical each time.
Beverages alone are one of the major sources underestimated calories. A 20oz bottle of soda with sugar is multiple servings, but people don't think about it as such. The same goes for fruit juice and a lot of the fancy coffee beverages. Alcohol is also easy to underestimate, especially if a glass of wine with dinner can turn into half a bottle or more, or a nightcap turns into a double.
Nobody is arguing that we aren't learning more about weight and nutrition, but that doesn't mean we ignore science for personal anecdotes that are likely untrue.
In a way, its sorta like how flat earthers and anti-vaxers work, you're just part of a third type that denies nutrition science. I did exactly what I said I did, and so have many other people, and what you're engaging in is an odd form of fat shaming (seeing as I'm not fat anymore, but used to be; and lost my weight entirely by following the science where it lead me).