>Well, now it isn't clear what you mean at all, because you've said you advocate Weight Watchers while also advocating a simple belief that "it's physically impossible for a body to gain weight if it's burning more calories than it's using". The people at Weight Watchers are very clear that "we know that a calorie isn’t just a calorie": they advocate modifications in the kinds of things that you eat and the way you live your life that will lead to a healthier body and, as a side effect, weight loss; in the process, they have a fairly complex equation that assigns "points" to different food items based on a bunch of different quantifiable metrics. This is exactly the kind of "too complicated" advice that you complained at glaugh about.

You know what the complicated formula is? calories/50.

(Full disclosure: It has some very tiny adjustments if it has too much fat it gets an extra 1/2 point.. lots of fiber gets -1/2 point.)

You wanna know how well this works? I've seen people eat their daily points intake by eating nothing other than Big Macs (for most people it's around 4 daily). I've also seen a guy eat nothing other than chips and beer, but not go over his points.

They all lost weight, because they ate less calories than they used, which the WW points system is all about.

As I said, I've seen hundreds of people lose staggering amounts of weight, and I've never seen a single person that didn't lose weight when they ate less calories than they used. It never made a lick of difference what they ate, only the amount of calories they consumed.