[gateorade]

It's complicated. Reducing calorie intake is absolutely a path to weight loss, but we tend to ignore the adaptability of the body. If you suddenly reduce your caloric intake, the body thinks it's entering into a time of scarcity and will lower its metabolic rate through hormone modulation and by shedding muscle.

This is one reason why people struggle so much with dieting. They lose lot's of weight at first, but then plateau when the body adapts. When they get discouraged and fall off the diet, they put the weight back on quickly because they now are burning less calories than when they started.

The most effective way of losing weight long term is likely some combination of a slight caloric deficit paired with resistance training (to discourage the body from shedding metabolically expensive tissue) and short bouts of reverse dieting . (ie. slight deficit for 3 weeks, then 1 week of a slight surplus, etc.)