[deleted]
It takes superhuman willpower to go to bed hungry every day when you have the option not to. That's why people on low-calorie diets so frequently (read: almost always) put non-trivial weight back on within a few years.
Your brain tells you to eat n calories. Your brain will make damn sure that you eat every bit of n. Telling a person who can't eat less than n that they're lazy is like telling a schizophrenic that they should just snap out of it.
The book makes a strong case that the key you mention is in fact a fallacy. There is a correlation between calorie surplus and weight gain, but saying the first caused the second is like saying (to use an example from the book) that alcoholism is caused by drinking too much — tautological, and not useful in fixing the condition.
Taubes goes on to argue that because of an underlying metabolic condition (induced by a carb-heavy diet, as it turns out), your body decides to gain weight and so makes you eat more calories than you burn. So it's not that you gain weight because you eat too much, it's that you eat too much because you're gaining weight.
Edit: sorry to rsheridan6 for using the "true, and not useful" turn of phrase without having realized someone else beat me to it. Guess that means it's a good one here.