No. Just no. Please stop it with this old broscience myth crap. Calories are king. Always was, always will be. Macros are second. Even with the right macro set up, if you're eating too many calories, you're not going to lose weight. For Joe Blow dieter, they can simply eat less calories and lose fat. As an athlete or weight lifter, our goal is also to maintain muscle. Therefore, macros become the secondary factor in outcome.
If calories and macros are in place, then you will succeed in hitting your goals, regardless of the foods you eat. "But eating cake and ice cream will give less results than eating chicken and rice!". Bullshit! Where this argument falls short is that ice cream and cake lack protein, and, contain so many carbs and fats, you will fill those macros extremely fast and be left with nothing to eat except for dry whey isolate powder trying to make up for the protein you still need. You cannot JUST eat cake and ice cream in a flexible diet and meet your required macros. This is where the whole argument goes out the window.
Instead, IIFYM/flexible dieting allows people to eat whatever they want, as long as they meet their macro requirements, but everyone soon realizes that it's not all just cake and ice cream. Hell, I eat hotdogs, bread, pasta, ice cream, chili, nachos...and I get ripped from doing it. No cardio either, and no, this isn't genetics. There are entire threads of hundreds of people doing it over on the BBing.com forum and showing their results. Literally, hundreds. I put it off for an entire year before finally giving in to it, and I am glad i did. NOt only did it work amazingly, I now have a life, and I now realize the false information I Had been reading on the forums and BBing articles for all these years.
the myth is that a calorie is a calorie...
like i said look into how they even came to the calorie system and how they decide what any given food has calorie wise.. its a flawed system.. its not worthless in its general use to keep in mind, but its very flawed.
you are wrong and this is not (ole broscience) i havent come to this conclusion from just parroting others posts..
even the newer system is flawed in taking a given amount to each macro then added up but not every "protein" or "carb" is the same. (and please dont argue 20g of carbs from a pop or pure sugar is the same as from say a head of broccoli or even pasta)
there is better info but this was a quick search on my points:
"
Jim Painter, an assistant professor of food science and human nutrition at the University of Illinois, explains.
In order to answer this question, it helps to define a calorie. A calorie is a unit that is used to measure energy. The Calorie you see on a food package is actually a kilocalorie, or 1,000 calories. A Calorie (kcal) is the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of 1 kilogram of water 1 degree Celsius. Sometimes the energy content of food is expressed in kilojoules (kj), a metric unit. One kcal equals 4.184 kj. So the Calorie on a food package is 1,000 times larger than the calorie used in chemistry and physics.
The original method used to determine the number of kcals in a given food directly measured the energy it produced.The food was placed in a sealed container surrounded by water--an apparatus known as a bomb calorimeter. The food was completely burned and the resulting rise in water temperature was measured. This method is not frequently used today.
The Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990 (NLEA) currently dictates what information is presented on food labels. The NLEA requires that the Calorie level placed on a packaged food be calculated from food components. According to the National Data Lab (NDL), most of the calorie values in the USDA and industry food tables are based on an indirect calorie estimation made using the so-called Atwater system. In this system, calories are not determined directly by burning the foods. Instead, the total caloric value is calculated by adding up the calories provided by the energy-containing nutrients: protein, carbohydrate, fat and alcohol. Because carbohydrates contain some fiber that is not digested and utilized by the body, the fiber component is usually subtracted from the total carbohydrate before calculating the calories.
The Atwater system uses the average values of 4 Kcal/g for protein, 4 Kcal/g for carbohydrate, and 9 Kcal/g for fat. Alcohol is calculated at 7 Kcal/g.
(These numbers were originally determined by burning and then averaging.) Thus the label on an energy bar that contains 10 g of protein, 20 g of carbohydrate and 9 g of fat would read 201 kcals or Calories. A complete discussion of this subject and the calories contained in more than 6,000 foods may be found on the National Data Lab web site at
http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/. At this site you can also download the food database to a handheld computer. Another online tool that allows the user to total the calorie content of several foods is the Nutrition Analysis Tool at
http://www.nat.uiuc.edu."
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-do-food-manufacturers/