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Notes -
According to this, that Biggest Loser study was an extreme outlier, and numerous other studies have found either no effect or a much smaller effect.
I think a big tripping point is what you're counting as energy expenditure. For instance, the piece you linked cites this meta-analysis and claims it "found no penalty". However, if you look at the actual meta-analysis, one of the inclusion criteria is
So, it is looking at various measures of resting metabolic expenditure. In other words, it is explicitly excluding studies of non exercise activity thermogenesis (NEET) - that is, it is excluding "the energy expended for everything we do that is not sleeping, eating or sports-like exercise" - this is summarized as "fidgeting"
When I skim the other links the article uses to prove that there is no effect, I see the same issues. The one study they cite without this issue found significant declines in energy expenditure.
Other studies also find large changes in energy expenditure and suggest (1) the degree of change varies significantly from person to person and (2) is largely genetic. For instance, in this study, researchers established a neutral level of calories needed by each member of a collection of identical twins, added 1000 kcal to that, and then fed that to the twins over 100 days while they lived mostly sedentary lives under 24-hour supervision. Before and after, they measured energy expenditure on the neutral diet. Based on a naive CICO model, each of these twins should have gained ~12 pounds. Instead (see Figure 1), they gained between 4 and 13 pounds.
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