In principle, yes, of course. That’s the “avoid junk food” diet.
Unfortunately, trying to restrict total calories this way without counting gives you a relatively narrow margin of error, and most of us aren’t very well-calibrated. A normal calorie deficit for weight loss means eating ~20% below your maintenance level, so if you overshoot by 25% (quite easy to do when you’re not measuring portion sizes), you’re making zero progress and don’t even know there’s a problem.
It is comparatively difficult to accidentally eat bread at every meal without noticing.
Then again, if one day you overshoot by 25% and another day you undershoot by 25%, the (first-order) effects cancel out (there are second-order effects, but they are, well, second-order). Unless there’s a systematic error, in which case you will notice in a couple of weeks, because you will gain/lose weight at a rate different than you want to gain/lose weight at.
In principle, yes, of course. That’s the “avoid junk food” diet.
Unfortunately, trying to restrict total calories this way without counting gives you a relatively narrow margin of error, and most of us aren’t very well-calibrated. A normal calorie deficit for weight loss means eating ~20% below your maintenance level, so if you overshoot by 25% (quite easy to do when you’re not measuring portion sizes), you’re making zero progress and don’t even know there’s a problem.
It is comparatively difficult to accidentally eat bread at every meal without noticing.
Then again, if one day you overshoot by 25% and another day you undershoot by 25%, the (first-order) effects cancel out (there are second-order effects, but they are, well, second-order). Unless there’s a systematic error, in which case you will notice in a couple of weeks, because you will gain/lose weight at a rate different than you want to gain/lose weight at.