I am saying people need to eat less calories.
They are not the same thing.
Also, anyone trying to lose weight does not need to be eating in restaurants. Obviously this is very difficult for many people, due to convenience, etc. but I suggest that if people can cut down their restaurant visits by 1 a week, they will likely lose weight.
People here seem to think I was saying the process of losing weight is easy, which I did not say. The method is simple to understand, but the execution is often the most difficult thing many people will do in their lives.
Your satisfaction from food isn't simply proportional to the weight or calorie content of the food. Foods aren't created equally in terms of how satisfying they are per calorie. My point is that the conventional wisdom of eating lots of bread/pasta is counter-productive simply because they're not very satisfying. A cheesy omelet isn't more or less food than a plain bagel, but for a similar calorie count I'm a lot happier 2 hours later. That's the essence of my point.
> Also, anyone trying to lose weight does not need to be eating in restaurants.
I live in New York and so pretty much only eat in restaurants (nobody here cooks). On a keto diet it's no big deal. Restaurants make money by selling you tons of carbs to inflate entree sizes. If you don't eat carbs, there actually aren't all that many ways to blow your calorie budget. If I'm at a restaurant, I can easily order a big steak and steamed veggies and mushrooms, or fish/chicken with a fatty sauce and keep within ~600-700 calories. The restaurant has no financial incentive to give me a lot of these expensive ingredients, so they don't. Psychologically, it's a lot easier to feel satisfied cleaning your plate of those things than leaving half your huge plate of pasta uneaten.
The key to weight loss is sticking to your diet. That means adopting a diet that's easy to stick to. In my opinion, ketogenic diets are easier to stick to (for typical people) for two reasons:
1) there are lots of tasty, filling, foods that fit into the diet; 2) meat/dairy aren't peddled to bulk-up entrees in the same way as carbs (e.g. free tortilla chips and salsa) so cost forces some discipline;
Re: 1. Say you're at a restaurant and want to order a salad. On a low-fat diet, you might have some grilled chicken with bland greens with no dressing and a bread-stick. On the "eat less" diet, you might just leave a quarter of the food untouched and starting at you. On a keto diet, you can slather an ounce of caesar dressing on that salad in exchange for just leaving aside the croutons and breadstick. The first option fills you up, but isn't tasty. The second option leaves you a little hungry. The third option fills you up (because you eat all the greens, which take up volume) and is tasty (because even greens are tasty with caesar dressing).
YMMV, but pretending it's just a simple math equation is stupid and sets people up for failure. It is math, but it's a complex optimization problem. Each food item has two associated values: satisfaction and calories. The goal is to optimize satisfaction at a given calorie budget.
I think on a satisfaction per calorie basis, carb-y foods often lose unless you put fat/sugar in them. What would you rather have for breakfast? A two-egg omelet with an ounce of shredded Parmesan cheese, or a plain bagel (both 280-300 calories)?