Because the body is well-known to adjust your metabolic rate to the amount of food you give it. This is explained over and over and over and over and over again on these forums. Drop your caloric intake intentionally, and you risk lowering your metabolic rate to match. So at that point, you are no longer eating at a caloric deficit, because your body has retrenched in order to get you safely through the famine. So you lower your caloric intake again, and your body again lowers your metabolism to match. And so on. At some point, you can’t take the hunger any longer and end up bingeing. At that point, you’ll be very lucky if you don’t end up fatter than you were at the beginning.
When you give your body a bit more food than it needs, it speeds up your metabolism and can actually waste energy, in order to compensate for the excess intake. This is why we strongly advocate eating to satiety, because that way you know you’ve given your body enough food to do the things it wants to do, without giving it too much. If you should happen to have some excess stored fat on hand, your body will feel safe letting it go and will adjust your appetite to make use of that stored fat, by causing you to eat a bit less. Your metabolic expenditure does not change, however, merely the source of the calories used to feed it.
So the distinction is whether our eating has put our body into famine-response mode, or into energy-use mode. Intentional caloric restriction puts the body in famine mode, in which it is reluctant to let go of any of its reserves (including excess stored fat). Caloric abundance, by contrast, allows the body to regulate metabolism and appetite to make efficient use of all resources, whether exogenous (i.e., food) or endogenous (i.e., excess stored fat).
I really don’t know how this can be explained any more clearly than this. The key lies in the body’s response to the food we eat. The standard advice to “eat less, move more” generally results in undesired consequences, whereas a well-formulated ketogenic diet usually results in desirable consequences, with the added advantage of not needing to count calories unless it gives you pleasure to do so.
Overeating to any degree is actually not a pleasant experience (certainly not for me), once satiety signaling has been restored. Once your hunger is satisfied, why would you want to eat more than that, in any case?
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It may have been from Dr. Fung but not seeing it today… Oh well - we’re agreed that any meaningful increase in insulin secretion is suspect for autophagy.
