What I'm saying is that if you eat a serving of something, the package says x calories per package (and x servings per package, for those packages that are clearly one serving but say 2), and you write down all of those values you ate, and you arrive at a number... that number is entirely fictional.
When I say I ate around 2000 calories a day on the SAD (standard American diet), I have no clue. That is the problem with processed food, you have to trust the numbers on the box are correct because you have no clue what the recipe is, if the food could even be expressible in terms of normal ingredients.
Once you cook everything yourself, which also came with the diet change (because everything is contaminated with grains, refined sugars, and just weird strange shit), which makes it much easier to track calories (as USDA values for generic foods seem to actually be in the realm of reality).
If the numbers on the boxes were that wrong, this guy couldn't have done what he did: http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/...
I didn't say a diet that isn't calorie dense. I implied foods. As a lot of the "named" diets happen to cut out the foods that are denser in calories.
I also didn't say impossible. I said difficult. Most people aren't going to try and cram 130 cucumbers in a single daily meal.
And by tracking it "using the labeling on the package" isn't really tracking. That's just looking. And not everything has labeling or packaging.
I've always had success when I'm honest with myself and I ruthlessly record every single source of calories that I ingest.