Carried over from the Covid thread…
You are saying this to someone who has spent 20 years of his career conducting research into the neuroendocrine control of energy regulation. Things that you raise as new ideas are things on which I was published 15 years ago. You will be very unlikely to ever meet someone in your real life who has spent more time thinking about and advocating for an appreciation of the complexity of changes in body weight.
If you take issue with people who say weight loss is just a case of moving more and/or eating less - a supposed application of energy in vs energy out (EIEO) - then you have an ally. As attractive an idea as it is, no just because you burned 300 kcal on the treadmill does not mean you can have that piece of cake. It just doesn’t balance out like that. But that is not evidence of the falsification of EIEO. It is simply an illustration of the dynamic, non-linear characteristic of it.
If from a practical perspective you would advocate people to ignore EIEO and make specific changes in their diet (e.g. eliminate sugar) then I’d say there are many ways to skin this cat and so do whatever you have success with. Where I’d have a problem is in inventing magic theories about why such workaround strategies work. Any strategy you employ that produces weight loss works because it creates a caloric deficit. To this point, not all strategies are equal. This is clear. Some foods have different effects on satiety than others and so certain choices can help set someone up to succeed in creating and maintaining a caloric deficit than others in a Real World setting. But the data is pretty unequivocal - regardless of the diet composition in terms of macronutrients or other aspects of diet quality, it is the presence of a caloric deficit that drives the weight loss. It is actually crazy that we need these really difficult to do clinical studies to demonstrate this given how fundamental thermodynamics are, but that we need them to convince people is an example of how attractive magical thinking is in this area.