@mostlylurking Totally agree, I'm not sure if my post was poorly worded but I did not intend to contradict this. I was in the position years ago (before Peat and metabolism came into my cognitive awareness) where on 1500 calories a day I was not losing weight (or if I was a large deal was muscle mass). Obviously, the issue there was metabolism, not that I wasn't cutting hard enough.
I'm in the middle of a cut now and my priority is monitoring my metabolic rate through keeping an eye on temp and HR, not calorie counting. My point in the above post was more that you should have a calorie deficit when losing weight, but this is one, albeit an important one, of many factors in losing fat.