Anytime this comes up in conversation, I enjoy pointing people to John Walker's Hacker's Diet (https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackd

Anytime this comes up in conversation, I enjoy pointing people to John Walker's Hacker's Diet (https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/). I enjoy the bits of Autodesk trivia he tossed in as well (he was a co-founder and wrote much of AutoCAD, as he then thinks "So if I can do that, why can't I learn to lose weight?"). The most accurate critique of any of these "calories in minus calories out" arguments is that those vary from person to person and from food to food. So if you do have a particularly hard time losing (or gaining!) weight, it might be a bit of genetic variation.