Ah, but it matters WHEN said calories are ingested as to how rapidly they are burned. Calories ingested late in the day tend to be deposited as fat at night.
Most people have no idea how many calories they are consuming, even the religious calorie counters gives you only a rough guess.
And as for how many calories people are burning? It's impossible to measure outside a laboratory.
Weight control is primarily a feedback problem, and the sole meaningful measure is the scale. Unfortunately, that's a noisy measurement, and not many people know how to extract the real data from the noise.
That's what John Walker introduces, in his "Hacker's Diet". Not information on what to eat, or when to eat, or how much to exercise. There are plenty of diet books with advice on that. "The Hacker's Diet" provides methods that will tell you whether what you are doing is working - feedback so that you have the information you need to eat more, or less.
