It is a LOT more complicated than that, and your last sentence has one of the largest clues Timing of eating relative to your daily metabolism, as well as util

It is a LOT more complicated than that, and your last sentence has one of the largest clues Timing of eating relative to your daily metabolism, as well as utilizing (or not) different metabolic modes has a LOT to do with how food energy is stored vs burned vs dumped. E.g., Intermittent Fasting is starting to be recognized as a highly useful method for weight and health control. At a high (oversimilified) level, consider that your body has two modes, storing energy vs removing energy from storage for burning. Intake of food more or less constantly (vs only at limited times) keeps the body in storage mode. OTOH constraining eating to limited periods during the day forces the blood sugar down and causes the body to switch to taking energy from storage. Thus, people can intake the same calories and do the same exercise/exertion levels, yet lose more weight when they restrict their calories to within a 8-12 hour period during the day. Similarly, studies with holding amounts of food and exercise constant, but having Group A do their running before breakfast, vs Group B running the same amount sometime during the day resulted in greater weightloss for GroupA - they were forcing their body to dig deeper into their stored energy instead of just burning off of the circulating blood sugars from the current meal, because of the longer fast before the run. And this is only one of the many factors that affects how storage works. So, sure technically, it is 'intake fewer than burning', but that is a triviality considering all the other metabolic factors that can affect. So, good job cutting out those midnight snacks! (I've found that moving the last bite to before 4PM on several days a week makes a big difference, but YMMV)