[Espi]

I reread the entire part and now more closely and I finally understood the entire section was written by Mr. Bray.

Tracking calories is an art of its' own.. EVEN when you're trying to be completely honest with yourself. As soon as you no longer weigh anything but eyeball stuff or use volume you're already OFF. Also, the psychological part is huge. I've started tracking calories since the summer of 2004 and for a couple of months the simple task of having to track everything I ate made me eat less.

There's one thing I really dislike about the entire discussion pro/con Taubes' GCBC is that everyone seems to be prejudiced already before drawing a conclusion. Unfortunately Taubes is one of them as apparently he cherry picked the studies.

I must say from experience that nearly every single person who adopts a (Very) low carb diet spontaneously eats far less than they need. Unless they want to train hard as I had countless binges upon trying to stay below 30-50g of carbs and still try to do HIIT or high rep workouts. Carb cycling solved this problem. But most obese people on a VLC diet don't train and they generally respond very well to a VLC diet because of appetite suppression. Except.. when they are fooled to believe they can eat as much fat as they want and still drop weight like crazy. Since that is effectively NOT true.
Not even when you limit frankenfoods but just eat calorie dense cheese, nuts and/or sausages.

Finally, something the book doesn't address but I've experienced first hand, food intolerances can make you overconsume precisely those foods that you don't tolerate well. When you cut them out.. it becomes much easier to just 'listen' to your body and stop eating when you're satiated.
This of course is what Taubes meant by how you spontaneously can eat just enough when you cut out excess calories. He also has a very good point in how exercise can make you so hungry that you will overconsume calories. Many on this forum have experienced exactly this when doing very strenuous (metabolic) workouts.