Calorie present != calorie consumed != calorie processed by digestive system != calorie deposited in the fat tissue
If all calories were the same, consuming 300 calories from a can of Coke and consuming 300 calories of green salad would lead to same outcomes. In long term they do not.
There's a reason why you lose weight if you have a tapeworm or have chronic diarrhea while eating the same amount of food isn't a mystery to the scientific community.
Most people don't see that much variation between the calories that pass their mouths and those that are digested by their GI tract. It's usually constant enough that calories in - calories out is enough to figure out how much you need to eat to lose weight. Even if there was a disparity between calories consumed and calories processed by the GI tract, that would only present itself as a "higher/lower metabolism" and wouldn't mean lowering calories wouldn't work to lower weight.
You can't get around physics and biology.
Okay, but that seems like an outlier case. The study I am looking for would be summarized roughly as "100 fat people start on a lower-calorie diet and increase their exercise routine over the course of 180 days. 98% of them (some statistical variation to account for weird genetics) consistently lose X pounds, a large group (60-70%) loses as many as Y pounds".
Most experiments that were set up that way either ended up reporting the results "inconclusive", or worse, as the caloric intake generally decreased, the weight increased http://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(96)00456-1/abstract
I am looking for the one, or two, or a dozen, that doesn't. Should be relatively easy to replicate.
It can be that our models for calculating TDEE, etc. are wrong and not accounting for a multitude of factors that might affect energy expenditure but still, it boils down to calories in -> calories out in the most simplistic level.