People get obese on "whole foods" just fine if they do not count calories. For some it is not needed since they live physically active life and naturally do not eat all that much. Yet others can barely fit in their cars on the same food.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/stop-counting....
""" "This idea of 'a calorie in and a calorie out' when it comes to weight loss is not only antiquated, it's just wrong," says Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity specialist and assistant professor of medicine and pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. """
But I´ll give her the benefit of a doubt that the quote is pulled from a larger reasoning.
If the body was an actual furnace, calories in calories out would be an excellent mantra.
But it is not. It's a complex chemical machine with complex feedback loops. You do not ingest pure energy, you ingest matter that might be processed into food and stored using a ton of different chemical pathways, some more efficient than others.
If I ingest 2000 kcal of cellulose, I indeed get 2000 kcal of cellulose out, not as energy but as undigested faeces. If I ingest 2000 kcal of fat, my body behaves completely differently than if I ingest 2000 kcal of pure carbohydrates, than if I ingest 2000 kcal of pasta.
So, please let's stop with his reductive CICO meme. We all know thermodynamics, but it's a very bad model for explaining how the body handles food, hunger and long term energy storage. Focusing on calories is like comparing vehicle speeds by solely focusing on their horse power. There's a relation, but it conveniently ignores hundred of other variables that might show an opposite outcome.
The shape of the car, as a variable effecting the vehicle speed, does not make horsepower plain wrong.
An RC car with 10 bhp is faster than a truck with 20 bhp.
Putting 1000 kcal of kerosene in your engine has a completely different effect than 1000 kcal of diesel.
A 2000 kcal diet is not like another 2000 kcal diet, unless it is composed of the same foods, and the two subjects have a similar genetic makeup and gut flora.
what does this even mean?
Here is a link to the metrics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicular_metrics
Here is video explaining why horsepower doesn't really make that much sense. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gC2-JKO0c2I
Just like calories, horsepower doesn't explain much.
It is like saying that Newtonian mechanics is wrong because we now have smart bombs.
Everyone who reduces their caloric intake below their expenditure will lose weight.
Those that try to eat their daily intake in pure sugar will 1) feel like absolute garbage and lie in a comatose state further reducing their expenditure 2) overeat.
Those that eat something at least close to being actual food. Like.. a potato that hasn't been fried in palmoil will feel full and less like a bag of shit.