"For researchers and public health authorities to make real progress against obesity and the obesity‑diabetes epidemics, they will have to shed their energy-balance thinking, their obsessive focus on how much people eat and exercise. Instead, borrowing again from Hilde Bruch in 1957, they’ll have to focus on fat metabolism and storage itself, “since by definition excessive accumulation of fat is the underlying abnormality.” If they think of obesity as it simply and clearly is, a disorder of excess fat accumulation, they might actually figure it out."Saying that weight increase is a result of excess caloric consumption is in some ways a distraction, because of course that's the reason why weight increase occurs. The real issue is what does drive caloric consumption, and the side issue is what impact do dietary components have on insulin reactions, metabolic reaction, satiation, etc....
What kind of drives me nuts is how they have an issue with that fundamental, never disproven in a single controlled clinical-condition study, statement of "An excess of caloric input over caloric output will result in weight gain. " It's fine to start off with that, and then move onto the more important questions.
I mean, they could start off by saying, "This statement may be true, but it's only relevant in a laboratory, and mostly irrelevant in free-living scenarios." I would agree with that as well. I think it was Taubes that once wrote, "Our (predetermined) weight determines how much we eat, not the inverse" which I thought was quite clever and backed up with a lot of studies.
Points for acknowledging you've created a straw-man however.