No one has yet refuted Gary Taubes’s point that CICO as generally understood gets the direction of causality wrong. It’s not that we lose weight because we eat less, but rather that we eat less because our hormones put us in weight-loss mode. Attempting to adjust our energy balance by restricting calories is self-defeating over the long term, because of the body’s metabolic adjustments to the shortage of calories. We all know that teenagers gain height and weight because their hormones cause them to do so; the voracious appetite is a consequence of the growth, not the cause. I personally see no reason why that should fail to remain true in adulthood.
I heartily recommend this explanation of how human metabolism works, by Nadir Ali, M.D.: