No it’s with the people. The first mistake almost everybody makes when they go on a diet is they consider it a temporary change, they’re going to do all this exercise and restructure their diet until they hit their target weight and then go back to normal. Everybody that starts in that direction is guaranteed to fail, even if they hit their target weight they balloon right back up because “normal” is what got them fat in the first place.
People need to realize it’s a religious conversion. There’s how you were and how you are. Of course even then, how many folks who change religion really stick in the new religion. Same problem with dieting.
It takes a lot of will power to completely change one of the most basic things of how you live. Especially when all the stuff you’ll be editing out is so much easier to find/ prepare/ eat than the new stuff.
I agree it has to be a permanent change.
But, should calorie counting be permanent? What you are recommending is that people turn their lives into one long math problem. That may work for people who are mathematically inclined, but it won’t work for everyone.
Again, when 95% of people fail to accomplish a goal using a specific approach (in this case calorie counting), then the problem is the approach, not the people.