Again, Is it more complicated than: maintain caloric equilibrium?

Or are you about to make a bunch of Socio-economic and cultural justifications for obesity that you will not extend to the unvaccinated?

Yes it is more complicated. Here's two reasons. Glucose only gets converted to fat and harmful proteins at about 1:4 rate, whereas ethanol, fructose, and sucrose get converted to fat and harmful proteins at double or more that rate. So mere "counting calories" is meaningless.

Secondly, and this is the one that people find weird, once you've weighed X pounds, and lost some significant mass, you must eat less calories than simple "calories in is calories out" would suggest, because our physiology reacts as if food is scarce, and will store fat to the detriment of all other functions.

Not sure why I cant reply to the below comment but:

1. Sugar and its substitutes are bad for you, yes thats true (Thank you FDA for recommending 10 servings of grains, and backing the lipid hypothesis which caused low fat (aka High Sugar) products to appear everywhere.

2. Unless the obese somehow violate the law of thermodynamics if you reduce energy in while maintaining energy out mass will decrease.

There's also a difference between difficulty and complexity.

edit : Also, what's the protocol/norm about posting the same reply in multiple threads? I can see some pros and cons to it being within standard behavior, and don't see a clear answer as to which is larger

Just because something is simple, it doesn't make it easy. Dunking a basketball is simple. But it's not easy for most people.

I promise you, if losing weight were "easy" then most people would look like Hollywood action heroes.