The article is not that bad, as such articles go, but the diet advice that most people get truly is. But to clear one thing up, factually speaking, if you eat less than you burn you will lose weight. I know because I did it so don’t tell me anything else.
But you can’t trust calorie labels. As the article points out, most are wrong. What you have to do is to monitor what you eat assiduously and then respond to your body regardless of the labels. I guess this is a non-idiot version of intuitive eating that’s actually concerned with health rather than giving someone an excuse to eat that third slice of cake.
As I’ve already said, I never counted calories when I lost weight. At first, I cut my consumption in half and just watched what happened. Unsurprisingly, I lost a lot of weight. In fact, too much weight. Then I started eating a bit more until I got to a weight I wanted to be (in the 150-155 range). Now, I weigh a bit more but that’s because I have vastly more muscle and I am trying to put yet more on.
Also, even if you are not weightlifting, eating a lot of protein and fat is much more likely to leave you satiated for longer than eating a lot of foods with sugar and carbs. Also, avoid processed foods and buy the highest-quality food you can afford. Makes it vastly easier to lose weight, as I discovered myself.
People want a canned, easy solution. But there isn’t one. Never will be. To lose weight, eat less than you burn, but doing so depends on knowing yourself very well, how your body works, and adjusting to its needs and pursuing what’s working and rejecting what isn’t. A tall order, but better than losing limbs to diabetes or death from a heart attack at 60.