This is a bit hyperbolic.
Always remember the Prof who lost 27lbs on the convenience food diet:
https://www.acsh.org/news/2010/11/09/food-for-thought-twinki...
Also remember that before the days of tracking apps and watches and services like Zoe, many of us were losing weight, keeping it off and improving athletic performance without any of that stuff.
Always remember that I’ve lost more than 30lbs in a month, more than 150lbs in a year, and well over 1000lbs in a lifetime, never used an app or a service of any sort and without resort to Twinkies. I’m probably in better shape than you, taking age into account… losing weight isn’t hard, at all, all it takes is an eating disorder and a maniacal capacity for self-abuse. The same is true for athletic performance, which is really just as stupid a metric as body mass. Managing a consistently healthy human body over a lifetime of injury and experience, that’s hard, and made harder with idiotic quantitative measures like calories or BMI.
You sound like you have a bone to pick.
No one “resorts to twinkies”. It was a dumb experiment to show that cutting calories really can work. The stupid foods show that you can improve health markers and lose weight by just watching calories.
It’s not the be all and end all of anything. Just a counter point to the silly “calorie is not a calorie” saying.
And I improved all my health markers and my weight by simply starving myself of any food at all. Sure, eliminating calories leads to weight loss, but the point of “a calorie is not a calorie” is that I could have done exactly the same thing by consuming 10,000 kilo-calories of charcoal a day too. A human being does not burn its food via combustion and pretending it does doesn’t even work over the extremely short run, and it certainly never works over the long run. This idiot, I’m sure, didn’t keep that weight off following that same diet… in fact my guess is he’s the same weight or heavier 5 years after the fact. Statistically that’s true of the vast majority of people who lose a significant percentage of their body mass by the means of any dietary or exercise change, BTW.
A calorie of A is not the metabolic equivalent to a calorie of B because a calorie is only a measure of thermodynamic conversion by direct combustion in a bomb calorimter and cannot tell you anything about metabolic usage of A or B. Thank you for pointing out that you can lose weight and improve your BMI by eating Twinkies… you can do the same thing by sucking your brain out through a straw, or for that matter amputating only one limb; those are also examples of false equivalence and poor quantitative reasoning.
And, yes, when I see people fight to spread what I know to be extremely harmful mythological beliefs, I have a bone to pick.