Calories Do Not Matter

Calories do not matter, macro distribution and personal hormonal response to food does. Some people pack on weight easily with fat and others do not. Some gain weight on protein because of hyperactive gluconeogenesis. What does not happen is the body "burning" anything or magically storing a unit of something that does not exist in metabolically-correct occurrences. The reason any food has a different effect on different people is because of very subtle differences in the millions of codes withing our DNA sequences, where there is not one identical set, even in twins, according to a few tests on DNA (it can happen, though). Our DNA tells our bodies how to do everything, even down to telling it what to do with fat. The answer to this would be to tailor your diet to your personal responses and it's really as simple as that.

And the fat as a lever? Bupkis. It's absolute nonsense to believe plate fat has anything to do with losing body fat. It's not only an individual response, but believing this defies the very basis of human biology and biochemistry.

Obesity and inflammation: the effects of weight loss
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/nutrition-research-reviews/article/obesity-and-inflammation-the-effects-of-weight-loss/7DE5BD1B13C41487F6DE50B8DD19220F
[Following the discovery of TNF-α and leptin as secretory products of adipocytes in the early 1990s, subsequent obesity research focused on the new functional role of adipose tissue, as an active endocrine organ. Many more inflammatory peptides have been linked to adiposity, which ultimately characterised obesity as a state of low-grade systemic inflammation, or ‘metaflammation’ which may link obesity to its co-morbidities.]
~ Following? Weight gain is inflammation, not just storing fat. The type of weight gain referred to here is the inflammatory and this is not associated with plate fat, but consumption of items the body produces antibodies to which also attack the person's own tissues.

And here's inflammation and weight gain:
Inflammation-sensitive plasma proteins are associated with future weight gain.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12882928

Fibrinogen, Other Putative Markers of Inflammation, and Weight Gain in Middle‐aged Adults—The ARIC Study
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1038/oby.2000.33

Association of Body Mass Index, Body Fat, and Weight Gain With Inflammation Markers Among Rural Residents in Japan
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/circj/67/4/67_4_323/_article

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And fat? It's not "burned", it's not simply fuel, it's nothing as described to us by the authorities at all. Until you turn into a car, forget all that nonsense. Fat is used as a material to create metabolites which are used for chemical and hormonal processes, as well as used to create new tissues in the body. Our body is majorly composed of phospholipid bilayers - phosphoros, fat, and cholesterol. We're made of fat, and it's just as important to cellular development and health as protein, and is just as much of a building block of every system in our body as amino acids. Our brains are made of fat and cholesterol, and the body does not choose body fat when plate fat is restricted, it actually slows and the metabolism tanks, causing stalls and holding onto fat. Based on biochemistry, fat is not a fuel, nor is it "empty calories" or "calories" at all, it's a vital material used in various processed, which happens to include energy but is a small part of the importance of dietary fat.

Does this mean there's no such thing as too much fat? No. This is entirely subjective to each and every individual and must be tailored based on personal reaction, but has absolutely nothing to do with "calories".

Increasing Dietary Fat Elicits Similar Changes in Fat Oxidation and Markers of Muscle Oxidative Capacity in Lean and Obese Humans
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0030164
[In response to an isoenergetic increase in dietary fat, whole-body fat oxidation similarly increases in LN {lean} and OB {obese}, in association with a shift towards oxidative metabolism in skeletal muscle, suggesting that the ability to adapt to an acute increase in dietary fat is not impaired in obesity.
~ Ergo, fat oxidation is almost entirely identical when fat was increased, not slowed or stopped in the people with extra packing in the trunk. They oxidized fat the same as the skinnies.

Now, when we eat fat or have fat, where does it go when we lose it if we don't burn it? We've been misinformed to think that we're machines, and that a fire which cannot be located anywhere in the body gulps in a specific amount of fat and burns it, then... Well, it ends there, because they don't actually tell you what happens to it, do they? I present to you, the answer: You breath 80% or so of it out as carbon dioxide, and the rest is turned into ketones, water, or free-floating hydrogen ions to keep your body in balance, called homeostasis. The idea that we burn it or use plate fat goes against everything in biological sciences and human physiology. It simply cannot happen.

When somebody loses weight, where does the fat go?
https://www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g7257

Explanation of the beginning of calories and metabolism:
http://www.businessinsider.com/calories-not-perfect-nutritionists-say-2017-5