Of course it's more complicated than this, but in terms of a general rule calories in/out is pretty darn accurate. Saying it is 'dangerously wrong', is dangerously wrong.
It's true, but in an unhelpful way. We've been telling fat people to eat fewer calories for many years, and we're not seeing fewer fat people.
It reduces a complex problem into a simplistic slogan that's then used by many people to hate and judge fat people. "You're fat, just eat less stupid fatty".
It ignores "satiety". It ignores all the psycho-social stuff going on around food.
It ignores changed metabolic pathways (one of the reasons people who take antipsychotic medications are overweight is because of the changes to their metabolism: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC487012/)
The things you're focusing on are _mostly_ micro and not macro, for 99.999% of obese individuals, CICO would help them lose weight. There are exceptions to every rule tho.
>Fat people can't manage to do that for more than a few weeks.
That's the problem. Lack of self control. Generally a result of psychological issues such as comfort eating or straight up food addiction. Doesn't change the fact that if those people were disciplined enough, they could still become healthy.
No, that is the basis of weight loss.
Focus should be on introducing better eating habits (better as in lower calories and better macronutrient composition), education and finding the reason behind their overeating habits since it's usually psychological one.
Yet another fact: altering the composition of calories, more protein and fewer carbs, seems to help overweight people eat less and/or burn more calories.
You're right, it does seem unhelpful (just eat/smoke/<insert vice> less!).
What is the proposed alternative though? Most people need a general rule they can follow to help them (read: can't afford a nutritionist/doctor). If it's a willpower issue, then we need to solve that, but just saying "Oh eating less won't help me" is just as bad.
We've been telling people lots of things and haven't seen [insert expected improvement from awareness campaign].
The matter of fact is that telling people about things they do wrong tends to not be very effective in general. It's not an indictment of a particular topic.
