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If you don't think that foods can contain twice the amount of listed calories, then why is it reasonable to assume so?
Suppose you do this, and eat 800 calories with a 1600 BMR, but don't lose any weight. What should you, go down or up in calories? Maybe you go down to 500 or something, but this week the portions are actually accurate, and you lose weight, but too much weight. So you go back up, and next week you don't lose weight, so you have to go back down... What information is being gained here? On any given week, you don't actually know if you're going to lose weight at all or too much weight.
I don't know why we're arguing about this. I think calorie counting works for weight loss, though I am less sure now that you have told me how inaccurate nutritional labels are.
I never said it's reasonable to assume that they contain 2x the listed calories. I said that 2x the listed calories is a reasonable estimate for an upper bound when your goal is weight loss. It's not the only reasonable estimate, and how reasonable other estimates are would depend greatly on the specific goals
If your goal is weight loss, I contend that losing "too much weight" is such a low-risk event, both in terms of likelihood and in terms of the "harm" that comes from it that you might as well treat it like it's not a thing. So yeah, if you somehow maintain weight at 800 calories at 1600 BMR, then you go down even lower, and if 500 makes you lose "too much weight," then you celebrate and keep at it. Or you go back to 800 calories with the knowledge that since you lost "too much" weight last week, it's okay to not lose weight this week*. CICO in weight loss just means to keep CI below CO; I didn't say that you want to keep CI at some specific amount below CO so that you can lose weight in some specific, predictable rate of X pounds per week or whatever. CICO is certainly helpful for that as a guide, but, as I've alluded to before, the accuracy of calorie labels, the accuracy of calorie expenditure measurements, and the regular fluctuations of weight that people experience through daily life make it so that you can't make very precise predictions in your weight loss, especially in short timeframes.
*You wouldn't adjust week-by-week anyway; that's just not enough time to see if there's signal in the noise. If your weight loss goal is based around losing weight each and every week rather than losing weight long term, then CICO isn't helpful anyway; you should be looking at things like fasting and dehydration, since in a week-long timespan, the literal physical mass of food and liquids you put in your body dominates over the mass that your body converts into itself in the form of fat, muscle, etc.
In that case, it seems that you have no problem with the concept of CICO. I'd also note that, again, I have not told you anything about how inaccurate nutritional labels are, because I have no special knowledge that I can provide about how inaccurate nutritional labels are. My layman's understanding is that they're mandated by the FDA in the USA to be within some reasonable range of error and tested for compliance, but I have no idea how good the enforcement of the compliance is, and I have little idea of what the range of error is (guessing I could probably look this up if I wanted to). I just use 2x as a reasonable estimate for a multiplier when trying to lose weight, since it seems doubtful that if nutritional labels were often underestimating their calories by 2x, this wouldn't have been caught and become a major enough scandal that I'd have heard about it.
If the only priority was weight loss, you would eat zero calories a day, not eight hundred or five hundred. You don't need a calorie tracker to do that. Most CICO advocates also suggest that you shouldn't do this and should target a small sustainable deficit of 500 calories. That makes sense to me because you couldn't target a deficit like that without calorie tracking.
It's better to target zero calories per day than one. When we want something we know is bad for us, we find a way to rationalize getting it. The simpler the rules, the harder to rationalize them away. It's easy to subtly exceed a 500 calorie budget and think you're being diligent. It's a lot harder to put food into a mouth that's totally barred it.
Intermittent fasting probably works better than calorie counting for this reason.
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