Counter anecdote: I "got fat" eating slightly too much relatively healthy, mostly home prepared food over a long period of time. I lost weight by noting how much I ate and reducing intake while continuing to eat the same food. I know some people who eat only fast food and maintain a healthy weight because they have a good sense of how many calories they require.
It's probably true that some people eat diets that condition them to eat too much, but you can't simply claim something as broad as "people get fat because they eat the wrong food" and be done with it.
The parent's "in < out" generalization may be broad, but at least it's true.
The body is not immune to the law of conservation of energy. If you think you can eat a caloric surplus of any food type and lose weight then you've resigned yourself to not think rationally.
" Large portions and infrequently. This makes and keeps you healthy, and you cannot overeat even if you try. "
the fact is that you can 'overeat' with ANY meal timing frequency or food choice. caloric balance takes precedence over everything else, even macronutrient breakdown is secondary.
You suggest otherwise and you couldn't be further from the truth.
" That is, plenty of animal fats, meat, eggs and fish, and very little carbohydrates of any kind. Large portions and infrequently. This makes and keeps you healthy, and you cannot overeat even if you try. "
Making the claim that it's impossible to overeat on specific foods is absolutely ridiculous.
That just happens to be the topic of the article we're commenting on here. It's also the topic of the book Tripping Over the Truth: The Metabolic Theory of Cancer by Travis Christofferson.
I'm not going to argue about the issue here, but I recommend that book for everyone. If nothing else, it's an interesting read for the history of cancer research and the development of chemotherapeutic drugs.
"This makes and keeps you healthy, and you cannot overeat even if you try. "
implies that you can make food choices which prevent you from gaining weight, regardless of quantity.
People get fat because they eat the wrong food, of which the effect of making them hungry and eat even more is only one of the many detrimental effects of unsuitable food for us or other animals.
I don't write this to change your mind, but hope that if someone else reads this, at least this might give them some encouragement, so that they might persist through to read about the issue themselves. It really is not easy to swim against the current.
Our bodies are far more than a simple caloric furnace. But luckily fatness, cancer and a myriad of other metabolic diseases resolve themselves once and for all without calorie counting when one starts to eat correctly. That is, plenty of animal fats, meat, eggs and fish, and very little carbohydrates of any kind. Large portions and infrequently. This makes and keeps you healthy, and you cannot overeat even if you try. Simple and elegant, which is always a prerequisite for any correct theory about nature.