This article goes to a lot of effort to make calorie-counting diets seem futile due to human nature, and there's certainly some truth to it. But I still think "pure" calorie counting (and by that I mean not changing much of what you eat, just how much you eat) can work for the average person.

It's just that, to "just eat less", you actually have to log everything you eat so that you can't lie to yourself and blow your calorie budget without knowing it. This is true IMO even if you're doing low-carb or any other kind of diet. Accountability and making it impossible to lie to yourself is key.

Personal anecdote follows:

I lost 50 lbs (220 -> 170 lbs at 6'2") by logging every single (non-zero-calorie) thing that passes my lips, and I've kept it off for over a year. I have no idea if the amount of willpower I have is typical, but I definitely couldn't have done it if I didn't log what I eat. My theory is that if you don't actually account for all the food you eat, you're more likely to slip out of good habits because you gradually lie to yourself more and more until you're consistently blowing your calorie budget without realizing it.

But I really have to log everything, no matter what, even when I overeat. I can never say to myself "I'm on vacation, I can skip a day" or "well I'm already way over my calorie budget, may as well stop logging." Even if I end up 1500 calories over budget, all the food I ate is right there in my log.

There's a couple of reasons why I think this works for me:

* If I log everything, then it's impossible to blow through 200-300 calories on a bagel without realizing it, because the act of logging it puts it in the front of my mind.

* So long as I log everything, I can allow myself to blow my budget now and again. But since it's logged, I know exactly how many calories I need to make up in the coming days. On a week-to-week and month-to-month basis I can make it all even out.

* Even though it's human nature to want to eat back all the calories you lost (and you will slip), there's nothing in human nature that's preventing you from logging it all. I may binge and overeat because my body's telling me to, but perhaps the next day when I realize I'm already 1500 calories over for the week because of yesterday, I'm better equipped to compensate for it and have a salad for lunch instead.

* Once you find the right number of calories, you can avoid under eating as well. For me I decided early I wanted to lose only 1 lb/week. So in the early months of my diet there was plenty of times where I was something like 600 calories under my daily budget, and I didn't feel like eating, but I forced myself to eat anyway. This throttled my weight loss, but I think it was a major factor in keeping it off... my brain never really went into the severe feast/famine recovery that made me yo-yo right back to my old weight.

The main downside of this plan though, is I have no exit strategy... I have my "maintenance level" of calories set on my logging app, and I really do plan to just log what I eat for the rest of my life. (I've been doing it for two years straight now.) It's completely automatic for me (I use the "Lose It!" app on my iPhone) so I don't even see it as a burden any more, but I know that as soon as I stop I'll slip back into my old habits and gain all my weight back.