Military intelligence gathering is so common that countries basically agree to not start a shooting war for overflying each others country gathering military intelligence.
If every military intelligence balloon, satellite, aircraft, drone, etc, was considered an act of war and destroyed, the world as we know it would have ended a long, long, long time ago, and none of us would be here having this conversation.
So, yes, it seems that the body "compensates" and controls expendeture as you've suggested.
Speaking in general, there are a lot of details to consider for CICO. When people count calories to below their TDEE, their estimate of TDEE is just that, an estimate, not their actual TDEE.
When calories are counted, how accurate are calories being counted? FDA regulations in the US call for the nutritional information on packaging to be +/- 20%, and when audited, the information is often found to be outside that ranges.
Every gram of glycogen stored in your muscles, the body also stores 4 grams of water. The cycle of exercise, fasting, caloric restriction, and refeeding and glycogen storage are going to cause large swings in weight that can make it hard to pull out trends until several weeks/months have gone by, but frequently people are micro-focused on daily weight flucuations and draw their conclusions about diet and weightloss from what is effectively changes in glycogen storage/water weight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_Open_Skies
Military intelligence gathering is so common that countries basically agree to not start a shooting war for overflying each others country gathering military intelligence.
If every military intelligence balloon, satellite, aircraft, drone, etc, was considered an act of war and destroyed, the world as we know it would have ended a long, long, long time ago, and none of us would be here having this conversation.