It's too bad that there are studies utilizing metabolic chambers, measuring activity, and those are not the studies that show metabolic advantage.
I overeat sometimes and lose weight and I am not a strict low-carber. I also count calories. What I've learned from my own experience is that the body responds over time so that eating a lot of calories several times, even, does not mean much when balanced against other more moderate meals. Yes, I HAVE lost weight eating pizza and donuts. 'Falling off the wagon' does not doom your diet, every diet coach will tell you. Once in awhile, it relieves the monotony. You get back on the horse.
Not only that, but I've lost weight eating only potatoes, lard, salt and butter, when potatoes were the only thing I could afford and I was a starving student. I also drank tap water. You can add in all the alcohol and mixers a partying student can handle - there are calories in those beverages, also! Par-tay! I did that, without gaining weight - it was a small part of my week. And I got thin enough to have other people worry about my weight.
Years ago, Dr. William Bennet wrote 'The Dieter's Dilemma' about what the thought was the 'set point theory' (the body clings to a certain weight and must be cajoled into changing it with diet and behavioral changes). He only had a few guidelines for losing weight - it didn't matter what diet - and one was to restrict yourself to a certain food or food group. You will lose weight because of the monotony while you have the 'freedom' to eat all you want of it. This applies to any food. It is why the cabbage soup diet works. It was recently demonstrated with the Twinkie diet and now the potato diet, and also the guy who ate nothing but fast food and lost weight.
By the way, I ate Kentucky Fried Chicken and pepsi-cola an entire summer and lost a lot of weight. I was a teenager. But my only source of food was food at the KFC where I worked. My best friend and I lived on food we took home (she was the cousin of the manager/owner and we were working all summer at his store), drank pepsi all night and played cards, got up in the morning and went to the store to eat fried chicken. All day! And lost weight. There was no other food to eat. Note: we ate plenty of mashed potatoes and biscuits, which were part of the KFC menu, too!
Did we eat 7000 calories of KFC three times a day? Even once a day? Since we were restricted to that food (it was tasty, too), we got tired of it. We even bought potato chips for snacking during our card games. It was junk food heaven. We probably added more calories by adding the variety of the chips than by helping ourselves to buckets of fried chicken. As soon as you add variety (as soon as your diet is not purely what you've been restricted to), you start putting on weight and adding calories. Boredom with the food group will do that.
It's not a capricious process. Low-carbers and other dieters who are on 'isocaloric' diets lose the same amount of weight.
'Ad libitum' when you are restricted to eating only a certain food group is practically meaningless. Eat all the eggs you want. But don't eat anything else. Eat all the nectarines you want - knock yourself out - but don't eat anything else.
What you need to see, for days and weeks on end, is a dieter who can be proven to consume 7000 calories a day (and above) and doesn't do anything but watch TV and lay around the house. Weigh the food and consume it and have proof (on metabolic wards, in studies done by obesity researchers, no food is consumed without producing proof).
No fair being bulimic, either! Then you will know for sure that day in, day out, high levels of caloric intake, if they are zero carb, are an awesome way to lose weight, demonstrating a metabolic advantage that the world has yet to discover and has to be seen to be believed.
I'm waiting for a scientist who will show that.
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