[iamt2]

What I see happening is many morbidly obese people who adhere to keto will initially drop weight, roughly until their BMI reaches around the upper normal range. Then CICO kicks in with a vengeance, and they have to be much more careful compared to before. Keto is a useful on-ramp for many to a fitness (or at least more-fit) lifestyle, but not a magic bullet, and I don't see anyone claiming you can skip counting calories while on keto, then still reach 12-15% body fat, and reveal abs. If you see someone writing that, then yes, they're quacks.

My personal rough rule of thumb is once you reach the low 20s percentage body fat, you either keep increasing cardio (preferably HIIT), or dropping counted calories, until your moving average weekly weight keeps trending down. Fit keto around that or even drop it, and it won't matter (unless you're the same subtype diabetic like me, and then keto is an essential ingredient to avoiding medication).

If you go in once a quarter for a VAP lipid panel (the most extensive lipid panel I could find), then as long as those numbers trend in the right direction, keep on doing whatever works for you. After being diagnosed with Type 2 and having to figure out myself how to beat the fucker into remission, I've concluded that medical science can give rough guidelines for describing metabolic processes, but it is up to each of us to hack our own bodies. Try one change, test the change with measurements, and repeat; commit the changes that work, fork away from the changes that don't, accept failures and setbacks as signals of what not to do, and move on.