crader,
I concider your advice to be great for a recomp diet, but not for someone desperate to lose a lot of weight.
I was in the hospital at age 56 and my weight had reached 356 pounds. I had several nasty complications with this weight, including developing an infection that needed to be lanced.
I wanted to get the weight off quick, so I proceed to alternately eat 3 meals one day and just two meals the next. I'd get up in the morning at 4:30 am and walk for two hours before breakfast (I took a two month medical leave from work to get started). I would add another two hours or so of walking during the rest of the day.
I had about 75 grams of protein on the two meal days, and about 105 grams on the three meal days. After a couple of weeks on this diet and some research I added 600 mcg of chromium and about 20 grams of Leucine a day to this diet.
Of course, I did lose muscle, but not near as much as conventional wisdom said I should. I figure I lost a little over 20 pounds of muscle out of the 114 pounds lost.
I was now almost 57 and my weight was now 242 pounds. I was still pretty heavy and was starting to get a little weak. This pushed me to starting the conventional wisdom diet exactly such as you advise. The results weren't bad, but not as good as I hoped for at that point.
In the next full year I typically ate 6-7 small meals a day with 250 grams of lean protein. I lowered my cardio to 40 minutes a day and picked up intensity. My weight workouts became much more intense.
Results of this phase two of my diet after one year of the 6-7small meals a day plan, I had lost just 7 more pounds of weight, yet I believe I had actually lost 25 pounds of fat. I gained back all my physical strength I had lost during the phase one part of my diet (I could bench about 275 again, and had even stronger legs than before the diet started).
My point is it took a whole year lose 7 pounds on the scale, and this would be very depressing to a typical person looking for fast weight loss. They would give up after a few months. I had actually planned to do a phase two recomp early on in my phase one fast loss part of my diet, but I think I shoud have put it off until I got down to 200 pounds.