Congrats. Just like a determined programmer will do well with any language/platform, determined individuals will realize their health goals regardless of which fad diet they are currently utilizing.
But a good diet or a good language/platform may help in realizing your goals by not burning your willpower.
A corollary to this law is that bad programming languages/platforms make you fat.
Seems that we are in multimodal distribution so the search for one size fits all weight loss regimen is doomed.
I have seen people succeed with:
Fasting (my first weight loss was that way)
Extremely low carb
Just training
Shocking life event (divorce etc)
The Pill - a friend of mine was quite fat until she started contraception and she thinned a lot for a year. Without dieting.
One interesting question that I do not know the answer to is the kinetics of metabolism for different macronutrients. How quickly can our bodies metabolize fat, protein, and carbohydrates? Is it possible that our bodies convert carbohydrates into energy very quickly, thus leading to an excess of energy that gets stored as fat? While other nutrients get digested much more slowly and only used if needed?
The basic question is do all ingested calories get used? Does the body have a mechanism for maintaining a certain "ideal" weight that can function across a range of caloric intakes?
Different foods make you eat more or less, by eg filling you up faster or keeper you satiated (and satisfied) for shorter or longer. So if you want to test your hypothesis, you'd have to carefully control for these effects, in order to rule out that caloric input is king. (I.e. my null hypothesis here is that caloric input is what counts in the end, but different foods have an influence on how many calories you actually consume.)
Anyway, the caloric surplus was just a simple example. Perhaps a clearer example would have been `trying to gain weight through fasting'.
Calories in - calories out doesn't mean "Calories on food label minus readout on the treadmill". It refers to the actual energy balance. Under no reliably observed circumstances has human biology been shown to violate the conservation of energy and matter.
The point of repeating "a calorie is a calorie" is to reconcile people to the inescapable fact that a caloric deficit, no matter how imposed, is the necessary and sufficient cause of lowered long term average body mass.
The problem is that some folk like to embrace Nirvana Fallacy as some kind of debating trump card. "You can't calculate future weight down to 1 gram resolution 6 months from now, therefore your premises are totally wrong!"
Well I can't predict the temperature in my bedroom exactly 6 months from now either. But I have a pretty good idea of what season it will be.
First article in the series:
http://www.gnolls.org/3374/there-is-no-such-thing-as-a-calor...
A lot of foodstuff a person ingests get used for other things - building, repairing tissue, making proteins and all other stuff that people need to be alive except oxidation for fuel.