Sigh... I'm still suprised that people don't understand simple concepts.

I found an article at CNN ("Study partly blames fructose for obesity jump") that says the current obesity problems are partially blamed on the increased use of fructose during the past two or three decades. Is this serious? Doesn't this imply that without fructose in our diets, people wouldn't be fat? Hello! Fructose or not, we're still talking about the same society that doesn't exercise at all, eats few (if any) fresh fruits and vegetables, and instead consumes huge quantities of salty, fatty snack foods and overly-processed fast food. How could it possibly make any difference if we removed fructose from the equation?

Why do people have such a hard time with the simple concept of balancing caloric intake with caloric burn rate? If you burn more than you eat, you lose weight. If you eat more than your burn, you gain weight. Simple as that. No smoke, no mirrors.

So if you burn 2,000 calories in a day but you eat 2,300 calories worth of food, you're eating more than you're burning and you will gain weight. Sure, that 300 calories isn't going to amount to a lot of weight by itself, but if you do that every day for 10 days you can congratulate yourself on adding a solid pound of fat to your body composition. Similarly, if you eat 1,700 calories but burn 2,000, you'll lose weight.

I don't understand why everyone tries all of the crazy, extreme diets (most of which don't work) without paying attention to the one approach to weight loss that consistently works.