The conventional wisdom is that we get fat because we take in more calories than we expend. Simple enough. We get fat because we overeat, not the other way around. Changes in energy balance—calories-in minus calories-out—drive changes in adiposity, in how much fat we carry around in our fat cells.
Ultimately, as I discuss in Why We Get Fat, this is a brain-rules paradigm. After all, both the components of overeating — eating too much, aka gluttony, or moving too little, aka sloth — are both behaviors and in this paradigm behaviors are psychological phenomena not physiological.
Researchers who live in this paradigm are invariably trying to discover what’s wrong with our brains or the signaling to our brains that cause this particularly cherished organ (what Woody Allen memorably described as his “second favorite organ”) to screw up. Why can’t the brains of people who become obese or overweight get the energy balance thing right? Or why do these brains effectively desire more fat on the body than is healthy? Why do they set the “set point” of adiposity too high? The problem with people who get obese is in their brains, not their bodies (even though the excess fat is in the body).
http://garytaubes.com/2011/11/catching-up-on-lost-time-%e2%80%93-the-ancestral-health-symposium-food-reward-palatability-insulin-signaling-and-carbohydrates%e2%80%a6-part-iia/
While I think Stephan Guyanet's advice to "eat bland food" might be helpful, and carb restriction is no panacea with so much social custom fixed on carb/sugar/wheat consumption, "eat bland food" will never approach carb restriction as a long term approach to both living well, being healthy and lean, and enjoying food as the human animal was meant to do.
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