As any grade-school social-studies student can tell you, cereal grains changed history. Civilization arrived in Mesopotamia when humans learned how to farm, process, cook and eat them. Suddenly, with organized agriculture delivering a reliable supply of calories that could be stored for the winter, humanity thrived. Because of new grain-based food staples such as bread, fried rice, pasta and tortillas, humans settled down and invented the wheel, gunpowder and TiVo.

Calorie counting does work, to an extent, but it completely ignores the fact that we lose fat, muscle and even a little bone when we lose weight, and the goal should be to maximize fat loss while minimizing muscle loss (some loss in bone density is normal, since we are carrying around less weight overall). And, the calorie balance equation oversimplifies the multitude of factors involved in weight control and ignores one very important variable: hunger.