If you're interested in simplifying the analsis, don't look at people who are trying to lose weight for your data. Look at people who are fighting to keep it on!! Read up on people who have to do significant amounts of work under limited caloric availability (not caloric restriction per se). At that level, 6 smaller meals keeps weight on (more efficient digestion). Eating fat leads to more weight loss (heat entropy). At a certain stage, how you do the work (cardio/crossfit) etc is irrelevant, because the order of magnitude of output=input. For a normal person at a gym, they are at a fraction of this workload. Walking an 4m/hour a day burns 400 calories a day. That's an order of magnitude off your metabolic rate of 2500/day. Walk or run 10 hours a day, you will burn 4000-8000 calories a day. You will deplete glycogen at hour 3-4 without a couple of those six meals. If you do this for 60 days on a 2500 calorie diet, even if its 40% fat, you will lose weight. Probably pushing yourself into unhealthy territory afer only a fraction of that time (if you have a standard BMI). That's a non-cardio, non-intensive workout BTW. That stuff is irrelevant, provided your metabolism is set to max by dynamic caloric consumption requirements at the same order of magnitude as base metabolic reuquirements. Cycling 40 miles a day (as the author claimed) is much closer to this threshold than other examples.