Comment by jclos

The core issue of CICO as you pointed out is that it's a truism that ignores key aspects of a diet that usually come with a restriction in caloric intake - hunger can lead to poor food choices (decrease in TEF) and leads to lethargy (decrease in NEAT) which can account for up to 500 kcal/day (don't quote me on this, just trying to remember the papers I had read a long time ago) and completely negate the dieting effort. That's not even accounting the approximations of CI.