Now anyone who brings a pocket scale with them is being a bit on the OCD side, hah. When it comes down to it, the calories in < calories out mindset is more that if you are going to eat something you -know- is high in calorie content, you don't eat other things throughout the day that are high in calorie content to balance it out. And if you can, exercise! It's all about balance. It's not really any different from most other diets, but it does take some general knowledge. Kind of like how Brahma didn't know that beans had carbohydrates in them, just having a baseline understanding of what is and isn't... well, whatever, is good for controlling your diet and improving your health sort of period. My opinion is that everyone should sort of know what they are eating, but that's from working in the food industry forever and doing consultation work for schools about nutrition.
Thai guy though? Aside from his obvious OCDness, you eat a bit and keep your portions to something sensible, then you don't have an extra slice of cake after dinner that evening. Maybe you don't drink that second glass of coconut oil. Sort of goes back to what Cad was talking about; day to day/week to week weight measurements and gains/loses shouldn't be looked at in a vacuum. You take a reasonable period of time and say "Hey I may not have lost 2lbs/1lb that week I had thai for lunch, but I'm down 6 pounds for the month. VICTORY!" And really, cheat meals happen. Just don't make it a regular thing and don't absolutely binge when you do.
The people that try and say "This is -exactly 103 Calories. I have 1697 left for the day!" are uh, almost always wrong about what they are actually eating, and sort of missing the idea of portion control and eating a balanced diet at a caloric deficit. Much like the ones who figure out what they can eat each day by taking one of those silly charts with the Calories burned numbers on it and taking it as gospel. There's a -lot- more that goes into those numbers than just looking up your height and age hahah. I knew I was consuming -around- 2600 calories per day (I'm not a big guy) even when I wasn't working out, so I knew that I needed to drop about 500ish calories per day or more if I wanted to lose weight at a reasonable pace. I ballparked what I was eating from 5 minutes of research, wrote down a couple of easy reference numbers and then figured out that I should eat slightly less of certain things. Especially since I really liked eating other things and didn't want to lose them, I just trimmed things around it so I could still enjoy having a pasta dish at dinner with a super rich sauce and other things I enjoy eating. Instead of eating a sandwich or something else for lunch, I opted for a salad, because I knew I was going to eat heavier at dinner.
Basically, things like that. There's no reason to go nuts trying to get to exactly some arbitrary number that you are almost 100% not going to actually hit because of all the other factors in food/your body/actual exercise. But if you can get a realistic view of your diet before you start trimming things and reducing portion sizes, you can pretty easily ballpark a way to a reasonable, sustainable caloric deficit. The people adding up 5s and 2s and stuff from random calories hoping to lose are going about it the wrong way. Figure out a ballpark 500 calories you can drop off your daily intake, and you'll lose about a pound a week. Really not much else to it than that hah. It does help if you prepare your own food, so after a week of doing a couple of minutes of checking calories etc, you tend to get a pretty good idea of what you are consuming and if you control exactly what is in each meal, you have a much greater handle on your overall diet. That is true for -every- diet.
