I will add my humble opinion, based on my experiences, my n=1. For simplicity’s sake, I will think of CI part of CICO as calories in, energy in, macronutrients in, etc. I believe that the amount of “in” does make a difference, but keto enables us to control that part a lot better and much easier than on SAD. I am from Europe, but SAD is a general term that applies to eating in EU as well, because the nutritional guidelines are the same. I think that the most important part of counting our macros, at least in the beginning, is that it familiarizes us with how much macros/calories/energy the food we eat actually has. We all underestimated the number of calories consumed (SAD and keto) and overestimated the number of calories we burned. I was IF before keto and let’s face it, we may call it fasting, but it is actually a calorie-restricting way of eating, because you just don’t shovel food down your throat all day long, it decreases the amount of food you eat and drink.
I have noticed that my husband and I eat a lot less than we used to before. I can see it on the amount of money we spend on food, what and the amount of food we cook and eat and the amount of money we spend and quantity of food eaten outside of my kitchen. For example: I was walking around Pula the other day, seeing tourists having breakfast, wandering around the open market, etc. and I remembered what I would have done before keto - I would have bought some pastries, some things savory, our fridge would be full of SAD food, then we would take a walk in the evening, have some icecream and continue on.
Keto drastically reduces our ability to consume the amount of food we ate eating SAD - we are limited by ingredients, restaurant options, and all the other junk, both “healthy” and actual junk, foods. We had no idea how much we actually ate until we started paying attention to the calories - you think you have one burger, but you actually had over 1000 kcal, followed by a dessert, add on some soda, a frappuccino and you ate more than the daily allowance in one meal. Before we had ribs drenched in sugar-loaded BBQ sauce, now we don’t have that anymore, we just have ribs - fewer macros we are ingesting.
I am not OVER-EATING on keto, I believe that I would gain weight if I over-shot my body’s daily allowance, and I definitely create a deficit by eating keto - I eat OMAD and the amount of food I eat is much, much less than before. Once our metabolism is healthy and our hormones are balanced, our body creates its own deficit. We are creating a deficit by decreasing the amounts of carbs we eat, directly and indirectly.
Do i feel like Im missing out on anything since going keto? No, because I feel so much better now, I can eat whatever I want, Ižm not riding the same rollercoaster we have all been on (trying to lose weight on SAD, hunger, over-exercising, etc). But it took me a lot of time to battle the psychological hunger and I think that I could easily over-eat on keto, if I start adding on sweeteners and ketofied SAD foods, nuts are something I cannot control and I think that any deviation from clean keto (eggs, meats, butter, EVOO, salad and green veggies) will cause problems. It is very easy for me to over-eat with dairy and ketofied foods that contain flours and/or sweeteners, my satiety signal goes wonky. Fat satiates me more than protein and I need to have “denser” meals to feel satisfied, but I consume a lot less food than on SAD and I only eat OMAD, because I am just not that hungry. So keto definitely reduces the amount of food/macros/energy I eat - from the list of ingredients to the lifestyle we now have (we cant consume about 90% of foods offered in restaurants and stores), hormonal balance and the nutritional knowledge we have now. You can all remember how much food we ate before, without lying to ourselves, that UK show “Secret Eaters” definitely applied to all of us.
I don’t know my body’s CO (i can estimate, but that number probably won’t tell me much), but I still think if I eat more than what my body spends, I will gain weight. Maybe somebody with a healthier metabolism won’t, but I would. This is why this test would be interesting - a clean OMAD keto for a month (eating to my satiety), increase the number of calories in with clean keto foods for the second month, back to “to-satiety” clean keto for the third month, followed the same experiment if I add in dairy and other ketofied items and see what my body does. I believe these palliative foods (dairy, ketofied items) will lead to over-eat and definitely gain some weight.
). I wonder if, all other things being equal and relatively ‘perfect,’ if the body has a genetic range which it rather tends toward - I’m picturing it being fairly lean, as often are the people found in isolation, eating ketogenically and with lots of food.
I think a lot of other normalization has to take place before the weight normalization finalizes. I never thought 144 pounds was anything special for me and in fact thought 160 pounds was ideal. Yet I’ve been at 144 +/- a couple pounds for the better part of a year now. This in spite of 
