The calories-in calories-out approach to weight management has been enabled, despite its historical, statistical, and clinical bankruptcy,  by an accumulation of circumstances alternatively comic  and villainous, but  it is the pernicious, if not viral, way that modern diet causes the dieter to blame themselves that has most enabled the obesity epidemic’s  continued growth.

Even if an adherent is current maintaining a healthy weight, the problem with believing a calorie is a calorie is a calorie, or that the key to managing your weight is simply to take in less calories than you expend, is this:  When that plan fails --and any survey of the obesity statistics since people started thinking in these terms indicates that failure is quite likely--  it won’t look like the plan is failing, it will look like the person is failing.   The dieter will say, “If I could have stopped eating those donuts Friday mornings I wouldn’t have gained this weight”, or “If I wouldn’t have stopped going to the gym, I would have burned off these pounds”.   So they don’t  change their thinking, and they will continue to fail.    What these dieters don’t understand, because their oversimplified view of food disallows this understanding,  is that their diet drove their behavior:  They HAD to eat those donuts.  And They HAD to take a nap after lunch instead of going to the Gym, because certain elements of their diet imposed dilemma upon them.

We would never suggest that the key to beating nicotine addiction is to ‘limit yourself to one smoke a day” and we shouldn’t attempt to maintain or lose weight on a diet heavy with foods that are designed to be stored as, or to otherwise make us accumulate, fat.   
 Food is no less a drug than nicotine and there is a clear, undisputed link between certain foods and storage hormones within the body: The control of those hormones is the key to controlling your weight.  Not exercise, not calorie restriction, and not fat restriction.  Numerous circumstances, some comical and some nefarious, have caused many people to deviate from that simple, provable, and in a skinnier age well-known, truth. 

The Obesity Epidemic is the result of that deviation.

If you are of the lucky but shrinking majority who can counteract the deleterious effects of certain foods by focusing on caloric restriction and exercise, count yourself lucky, but we shouldn’t,  just because some people persist despite living in such opposition with themselves, thrust such a proposition on the population as a whole.