[spicyusername]

Interesting thought.

Do you have a source I can read through to understand more? I couldn't find anything supporting that idea.

Before dieting, I would expect most people to be in energy equilibrium, where their weight matches their calorie intake and calorie expenditure. Changing one side of that equation will change the equilibrium, every thing else equal.

If you eat more, you will gain weight. If you eat less... you will lose it. If you want to keep losing it, you have to keep eating less. Every target weight has an associated calorie intake / expenditure.

No doubt there are metabolic levers to pull to optimize the timeframe and that psychology and lifestyle play a big part of caloric intake, but, again, thinking about all that isn't really necessary.

Just eat less that you used to and be consistent about it. And if you're feeling spry, move more than you use to too. Keep tapering down until you're at your goal weight. This is the diet that is probably the best fit for 99% of people who are overweight. Dumb simple. No way to fail. Literally nothing to think about except the spoon, and maybe which route you're going to take walking around the block.

[esperent]

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4803033/

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-Constrained-Total-En...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercise_paradox

[spicyusername]

Those are mostly just arguing that exercise isn't a good way to lose weight. No disagreement about that, although to be super nitpicky, "not good" doesn't mean "doesn't work", they just suggest that there is a cap on how much exercise you can do before your body stops burning more calories, so there's an effective limit on that side of the energy equation.

Also, from the second one:

    Long-term maintenance of weight loss requires sustained energy balance at the reduced body weight. This could be attained by coupling low total daily energy intake (TDEI) with low total daily energy expenditure (TDEE; low energy flux), or by pairing high TDEI with high TDEE (high energy flux

That's exactly what I'm arguing above.