No it doesn't. If you're not losing weight, it just means eat less. Every single fitness board ever knows that its impossible to know exactly how much you're consuming or exerting. Which is why you're supposed to just drop another 250 calories a day until you start losing weight again.
... which means the CI - CO is a useless equation because CO cannot be measured reliably in a standard setting.
You know that obviously, and so do I, but there are a lot of people (including here on HN) who argue that eating an Apple daily and otherwise not changing anything is guaranteed to make you gain weight, and that's just not true.
You say "cut 250" but the article just gave an example that 120 cals of different composition were netting amounts different by 40. That's a 30 percent difference based on composition.
