I'm sorry to hear that a network malfunction prevented you from reading the remainder of my post. To reiterate, it's true only in broad strokes, human metabolis

I'm sorry to hear that a network malfunction prevented you from reading the remainder of my post. To reiterate, it's true only in broad strokes, human metabolism is not precisely linear, there is a non-trivial amount of "slop" in the balance. You can "consume more calories than you burn" and yet still lose weight, and you can consume fewer calories than that while "burning more calories" and end up gaining weight. If you consume many more calories or many fewer calories then you will inevitably gain or lose weight. But to maintain a healthy weight, or to maintain consistent weight loss if you are over weight, the details of what you eat are just as important as the calorie counts. Taken together, there is very strong evidence that diets which concentrate on what you eat versus those that concentrate on calorie counting are vastly more effective. But, you don't have to take my word for it: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1014296 http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1014296