Since I have now realized how difficult my point is to understand, let me start over from the beginning, and I will try this time to answer you and explain myself without any humor or hyperbole, which only confused you further, I think. I will try very hard not to sound like Matt Collins as I do so.
So: the beginning. I don't think you ever got beyond this point, which was your initial problem with what I was saying and, presumably, reason for posting.
If you focus on "number of calories in" and try to reduce that number through willpower, or (even worse) if you focus on "number of calories out" and try to to increase that number while keeping the calorie intake the same, via willpower, all the data shows that you will certainly completely fail.
If that were the case, then it would be impossible for anyone to lose weight, ever.
No, that is not what I wrote, nor does that conclusion follow from what I wrote. Here is what I wrote:
1. There is one strategy for weight loss (that happens to be the most common strategy) which does not work.
It does not follow from that that there exist no
other strategies, and that none of
them work either! Not at all!
The one strategy which does not work is: exerting willpower
in a direct way to limit calories below what you otherwise take in. A mountainous body of research shows that that one strategy does not work for the vast majority of us. Indeed, as
Willpower puts it: "The results of dieting research tend to be depressing". Even very gradual, careful approaches like your own recommendation, Enoch, and no doubt like the final diet Oprah went on with the help of A-level professional nutritionists, etc., tend to fail if looked at over a period of years.
But that's just one approach. There are
many other approaches. There's one popular approach right now, for instance, to increase calorie expenditure by giving you some hormone that pregnant women produce a lot of. I got to hear all about it from a seatmate on an airplane ride. There's tons of approaches. There's a whole book store section of approaches, although I will admit most of them are variants of the one approach that doesn't work: directly and consciously limiting your calorie intake.
The approach I believe does work is this: limit your calories in an
indirect way, by changing the makeup of your diet to one for which your weight-maintenance system was designed for (as well as all your other systems).
the important core points (as I see them) are backed up extensively by pretty good science.
The core points, by the way, according to me:
• The body is built to regulate weight automatically.
"Body weight is remarkably stable in humans. The average human consumes one million or more calories per year, yet weight changes very little in most people. These facts lead to the conclusion that energy balance is regulated with a precision of greater than 99.5%, which far exceeds what can be consciously monitored." -- Dr. Jeffrey M. Friedman, M.D., Ph.D., head of the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics at Rockefeller University in New York.
This is the PID system (you can look it up) I was talking about. It's like cruise control on your car. Or, yes, like the sink.
• This system gets broken when we eat things for which our body is not designed.
• This eating of things for which our body was not designed accounts for the recent extreme rise in obesity and metabolic syndromes.
No other factors have changed dramatically enough in recent history. You bring up activity level (the computers! oh, the computers!), but activity level has not changed enough to account for it. Most of the research science seems to point to macro-nutrient dietary shift as the cause. The main shift has been to more and more carbohydrates.
• To fix the system, we just go back to eating what humans were eating all along, before the problem.
According to the Primal Blueprint and other Paleo approaches, this means to try to get back to what our primitive prehistoric ancestors were eating. This is a bit dicey, since it is not known exactly what these guys were eating -- it's called
pre-history for a reason. But we can speculate.
Bailor's approach is to just look at all the tests and studies that have been run by research scientists and Universities over the recent decades and draw conclusions from that. Nothing wrong with that. Now, all studies have flaws, and very few to none are the kind of very long-term longitudinal studies (following the same group of people over decades) that we'd really like to see, because longitudinal studies are expensive and time-consuming. But it's a pretty good approach.
One thing that all long-term efficacious weight-loss approaches seem to have in common is the reduction of carbohydrates. 
