>The point of that particular song and dance was that the ultimate cause of long term weight is net caloric balance. That's the one, simple, verifiable truth about nutrition that everybody agrees on. Everything else is a bunfight.
Any hypothesis which sincerely proposes that net caloric balance does not necessarily determine long term average weight must explain by what biological mechanism the conservation of matter and energy is being violated.

Consider this complete hypothetical, just to prove a point. Suppose that one individual's body functioned like this, due to a bizarre genetic mutation: Any excess calories this person ate under a high-carb diet would be turned into fat. Any excess calories eaten in a zero-carb diet would be turned into pure muscle mass, burned off in a raised metabolism, or are simply excreted.

Simply put, this shows that calories in/out can remain true, but only a fraction of what you need to consider to keep your weight under control, and this is essentially the assertion by Taubes et al., backed up by significant empirical evidence that these diets actually work, even if you disagree with the biochemistry of his arguments. In addition, there are issues like how hungry you feel (more likely to consume excess calories) under each diet, even after consuming enough calories to maintain a healthy body weight, and therefore how sustainable each diet is.

What you should care about when trying to lose weight is how fat you get under a certain diet, period. Not calories in/out, just everything.

So while you can say that "in the end calories in/out is the ultimate rule that determines weight gain, everything else is an inaccurate generalization," you're missing everything else that could potentially interfere with your control of calories in/out. It's like saying "The only thing that determines whether I can drive to my destination in my car or not is if I have enough fuel for the journey, so I don't need to concentrate on things like remembering to inflate the tires or inserting the keys into the ignition." Excuse the left-field analogy, but I hope you see what I'm getting at.

The truth is that Taubes et al. never disagreed with and add enormousness value to the line "Calories in/out" by saying "Yes but low carbs and eat a lot of fats!". Again, as a rule for most people, or a helpful generalization.

>You have no idea what my macros are, you're just assuming. For me protein is the number one priority and I let the rest of the chips fall where they may.

Well I stated it as a contradiction just to hedge that your diet wasn't similar or overlapping with ketosis diets. If it is, one could argue the point that a lot of the success people have with non-keto diets is at least partially because they actually are following a ketosis diet, albeit inadvertently.

>Lots of people swear by keto. Swing past /r/keto and you'll find a success story every day. You can also swing past /r/paleo, /r/loseit and so on and so forth.

I agree that different individuals can have success under a variety of diets. My argument is that the default diet advice should be low carb, high fat, etc., rather than just low calorie.

Although I would say most paleo diets are actually a very strict keto diets themselves, and almost all are low-carb anyway.