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Whether or not a calorie-restricting diet in the long run works out is completely immaterial. You submit a false dichotomy. You will start losing weight if you calorie restrict below your consumption. You will gain it if it is the opposite. There is no such thing as CICO advocacy insomuch as it is an iron law of biology of which we all must obey, regardless of our intellectual pretensions.
Are humans a special sort of animal? Does not every other animal gorge themselves in times of plenty and starve in times of lack? What is the set point of a pig? A dog? A horse? As a species, we have engineered ourselves a constant state of endless plenty, which allows us to indulge in the incredibly silly idea that eating has nothing to do with weight loss.
Because the truest set point - engraved in the very laws of thermodynamics - is zero.
Start, but not maintain, which is what we actually care about.
There absolutely is, there are people engaging in it right now in this very thread, arguing that fat people are fat because they lack discipline and not because of metabolic dysregulation. You're doing it yourself (I think, your prose is a little too poetic to draw an actual position out of cleanly).
Yes, and then they rapidly return to their weight set points, as do humans outside of the developed world. Only in the developed world do we exceed our set points and then stay there. That is the problem we're trying to solve.
'Plenty' has nothing to do with it. Look at the table here. Chinese office workers in 1983 had the same amount of plenty (that is to say, the same amount of calories) as much heavier, fatter and taller Americans in 2016. The Americans should be eating way more, or the Chinese should weigh much more. They don't because the CO part of the equation is massively out of whack among the Americans.
In Britain, the last famine was in the 1840s. After that, the country had 'engineered plenty' and yet obesity was non-existent until the latter half of the 20th century, 3-4 generations later. If obesity is caused by having too much food, what took obesity so long?
This is an uncharitable strawman of my position. I'm not arguing that somehow the calories in obese people are being obsorbed from the air, I'm arguing that CICO is a symptom of weight gain and not a cause. You seem to be equivocating between the two positions within the same paragraph, arguing on the one hand that CICO is an immutable law of physics, and on the other that obesity is caused by humans choosing to eat more food.
To avoid us talking past eachother any more, I'll ask you this directly:
Do you think it is possible for the average obese person to return to a healthy weight and stay there by consciously limiting their calories?
Uh, yes? (This feels like such an obvious answer that it feels like a trick question.)
Chinese workers have gained 35 pounds since 1983, if you check out the latest statistics. So yes, western affluence has made them fatter. As for the British, I attribute it to the general decline of cultural shaming and the rise in quality and the low price of convenience food.
But we're getting off topic.
A lot of this seems to be the lose weight/maintenance mindsets, which I do not deny does not exist, but the rule is fundamentally the same. "Must I perpetually maintain my consumption below my output, for the rest of my life?" Yes! It sucks!
But just because it's hard doesn't change the fact that fundamentally, weight gain is happening because they're eating too much relative to basal metabolism + activity. Set point theory is the kind of just-so theorizing that people laugh at evo psych for doing. It smacks of what FA activists call 'intuitive eating', ascribing all of the agency to one's body instead of willful volition. But the body can be terribly stupid. For an addict, it is almost a surety. Even if a set point did exist, it should be - in every case - overridden by what the brain knows to be a healthy and safe weight.
The human body should not be a democratic institution.
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