Calories are a very broad way to measure what we need in terms of food. Eating 200-2500 at 50-60% carbs tends to make me fat-ter than eating 3000 at 20%.<p>I cook most of the food I eat, but I take calories into account very broadly, more narrowly when I diet.<p>Just to say, 1000 kcal might be half day worth of your energy needs on paper, in reality it's much more complex than that. In fact, if you are eating decent food and keeping fat% at ~30-40, I guarantee you that you will have troubles eating more than 2500 kcal per day. If you drink lots of soda and crap like than, then yes, you can manage even 3000. But eating a lot of calories is not such an easy task as many people think.<p>Edit: Wow, this generated quite a lot of debate. Just to clarify, I have never said that you lose wait eating as much as you want, I said I think we should consider the number of calories more broadly. Use ranges and look into the weekly intakes too. Check what you eat. Kill all the refined sugars. Kill all the complex foods. Start cooking. That will help you more than counting kcals to the gram. It's about how you shift your way of thinking about food. Lots of food out there is almost poison if eaten regularly, lots of this food is even labelled as "healthy", again, it cannot be only about kcals, it's _also_ about kcals.