There is more involved than just calories. It's surprising that this myth continues to hold, when we understand how differently macronutrients are treated in th

There is more involved than just calories. It's surprising that this myth continues to hold, when we understand how differently macronutrients are treated in the body. Calories are a second-order effect: you don't gain weight because you eat too many calories, your body demands more calories because it is hormonally/nutritionally imbalanced and, therefore, shunting energy into fat cells instead of allowing it to be used for energy. And this doesn't get into the fact that a high percentage of chronically ill patients (CVD, diabetes, dimentia) are thin. Having dealt with being overweight most of my life, I can't help but believe the reason the myth holds on is because it is a way to justify judging fat people as less than skinny people since they just "can't control themselves". Eat a better macronutrient ratio, and the body responds positively, even for isocaloric diets, whether for weight loss[1] or for maintenance[2]. But, really, isocoloric doesn't mater; what matters is ad libitum eating. Ironically, every study that I've read that compares low carb diets against low fat diets allows ad libitum eating for the low carb but restricts caloric intake for the low fat. Why is that? Even with that constraint, the low carb diets win[3]. 1. http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/early/2014/04/30/ajcn.113.081216.short http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/early/2014/04/30/ajcn.113.... 2. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22735432 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22735432 3. http://nutrition.stanford.edu/documents/AZ_abstract.pdf http://nutrition.stanford.edu/documents/AZ_abstract.pdf (I have a lot of respect for Christopher Gardner. He's a vegetarian who started this study because he believed a vegetarian diet would trounce other diets. It didn't, but he didn't try to game the results. That's an unfortunately rare behavior in nutrition research where so many people seem to be more concerned with proving their idea correct than finding the truth.)