[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.

[evol262]

There are essentially zero papers which show anything even remotely resembling this. In basically every controlled environment, CICO more or less works, albeit not with perfect efficiency. It's not until prolonged starvation periods or massive overfeeding periods that any sort of genetic/epigenetic limiters come in (overfeeding tends to be prisoner studies, the MN starvation experiment is the most commonly cited/most data from long-term starvation).

If dieting works in controlled environments, the obvious conclusion is that dieting does not work in uncontrolled environment precisely because of the poor food choices, and because we, as humans, tend to discount the amount of calories in small things through out the day, nor do we rigorously measure.

All a "NEAT decrease" is saying is "people are more lethargic when dieting". It would be unsurprising if this were due to crash dieting, but this cannot "negate" a diet. Reduce calories further until the scale starts to move. Or be more active, despite lethargy.