The body basically has a bunch of tricks for tricking you into not losing weight. It starts making you subtly lazier, reduces random energy expenditures, slows down basal metabolic rate, it makes you hungrier, it makes you crave more calorie dense food, and it even starts to reduce willpower related to food.

Absolutely this. Our body is constantly trying to maintain homeostasis, so when you make a big lifestyle change your body tries to react in the opposite direction.

Most people don't understand that when you start a new habit it often replaces another. When you start going to the gym you might walk less. When you eat smaller meals you might snack more. etc. I'd love to see a list of all the unconscious decisions your body makes in response to fitness/nutrition interventions.

I'd argue that it almost quite clearly indicates that focusing on calorie deficit is too simplistic a model to accurately predict/forecast weight loss. Just look at that subway map at the top of the article, there's no way that calorie deficit is an adequate model for the complex interaction of macro-nutrients and how different parts of that "subway" interact.

Maybe you don't have to entirely agree with me that Nutrition science's idea of a calorie is the last bastion of phlogiston theory in any science, but surely you can admit that all of the evidence suggests the model isn't accurate enough, continues to give surprising results that do not match reality, (and arguably causes more harm than good in the way some diet plans use calorie deficits as a bludgeon to make people feel bad). The models need to be refined, the human body is not an ideal furnace nor a "spherical cow".

(But yeah, I wish the Apple Watch would let me change all the displays that read "calorie" to just read "phlogiston" as useful as they "are" to me.)